On Jun 19, 9:53 pm, Joshua Landau <joshua.landau...@gmail.com> wrote: > Please be aware, Augusto, that Rick is known to be a bit... OTT. Don't > take him too seriously (but he's not an idiot either). > > On 19 June 2013 14:58, <augusto...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hello! > > This is my first post in this group and the reason why I came across here > > is that, despite my complete lack of knowledge in the programming area, I > > received an order from my teacher to develop a visually interactive > > program, until 20th July, so we can participate in a kind of contest. > > > My goal is to learn and program it by myself, as good as the time allows > > me. That said, what I seek here is advice from people who definitively have > > more experience than me on topics like: is it possible to develop this kind > > of program in such a short amount of time? > > Possible? Yes. > It'll be well'ard to get much done with too limited a knowledge base, > but it should be possible even then. > > > What kinds of aspects of Python should I focus on learning? What tutorials > > and websites are out there that can help me? What kind of already done > > packages are out there that I can freely use, so I do not need to create > > all the aspects of the program froms scratch? > > Neil Cerutti suggested Tkinter. Choosing a good simple GUI toolkit is > a good idea over Pygame for something like this. > I've used Pygame and I guarantee you it's not the hammer you want. > > (I don't know much about GUI's to be honest, though.) > > > > > It would be wise to give an abstract of the program. I made an information > > flux kind of graphic, but I do not know how to post it in here, so I'll use > > only words: > <STUFF> > > Thats basically the whole program. I've been studying Python for a week and > > half now, through: How to think like a Computer Scientist and Invent with > > Python and Pygame. I'm still at the very beggining, though, and I can't > > make much more than make some images appear on a Pygame screen in a > > menu-like style, with a patterned gap between them. No mouse interactions > > up to now. > > In regards to this, I really would recommend just taking Rick's > suggestion: Tkinter; canvas; menu; etc. > > Now, as I'm probably the most new programmer here I'll point out that > I don't agree with Chris when he says that: > > > One way or > > another, you will probably spend the next week writing code you throw > > away; if you try to tackle the primary project immediately, you'll > > have to rewrite parts of it as you learn. It's easier to throw away a > > toy "Hello world" program than hunks of what you thought would be your > > final code. > > As a new programmer, you will throw away code whether or not you > practice beforehand. Beware of that. If anything, it's the best thing > you can do*.
Speaking with the prejudice of teaching programming for 25 years :-) heres my take on this difference-of-opinion: Imagine your program as a final finished product of say 2000 lines of python. So you have to log-up that 2000 lines one by one. Do you prefer to use an adder or a multiplier? If you only do 'add-1' youve to take two thousand steps, if you allow mul-2 and mul-5 you can reach in 7. Chris solution -- get good before you start your actual work -- amounts to the second, Joshua's -- just start! -- to the first. Clearly the second is preferable right?? WRONG! You could get stuck in a multiply-by-zero loop! So you need the right combo of plodding along (Joshua) and self- improvement (Chris). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
