Don't overly concern yourself with your course being 100% up to date. When learning programming, the concepts are what is important, not the syntax or libraries you happen to be using. Even if they were to teach you the latest and greatest features of 2.4.2, that would be out of date in a few months/years when the next version comes along and the Python gods decide to deprecate the entire os module or something.
Syntax and libraries change; just roll with it. When you are a student, the important thing is learning the mental skills of how to put it all together. When I was a wee lad, they taught me Pascal, a language that is now as dead as Latin, but I now realize that the language did not matter; all that mattered was that I learned the basics of how to design and put together a program in a (procedural) language. Once I knew that, it was a cinch to teach myself C in an afternoon, and only slightly tougher to learn C++ and then Java. Python is a good teaching language because by learning one language you learn three major programming paradigms: procedural, OO, and functional. It doesn't matter if, three years from now, a Dark Age descends upon the land and Python becomes as extinct as Pascal. If your course was decent, you spent your time learning programming, not just learning today's syntax and libraries, and you'll be able to learn Microsoft Visual C#++.Net.Com.Org or whatever other language happens to be fashionable in the future. And BTW, map and filter are such useful concepts that it makes sense to teach them to students even if they will one day be deprecated in Python. If you want to teach yourself Haskell or a Lisp dialect (and you should!), knowing those concepts will come in very handy. Max wrote: > On monday I start a semester course in Python (the alternative was > Java). I was looking through the course outline and noticed the following: > > 1) UserDict is used. This is deprecated, right? > 2) There is no mention of list comprehensions, but map and filter are > taught early and then revisited later. I don't think this is good: list > comprehensions are, IMO, one of Python's great features, Psyco prefers > them, they're more pythonic, and map and filter seem to be going out the > window for Python 3000. > > What do you think? > > --Max -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
