Learn Python the Hard Way Exercise Solutions Now On My Github

Call it the "gamification of Github", but interestingly one of the motivators for me to continue studying a programming language was the little indicator that shows how much activity you have contributed to your projects each day under your account. Without uploading my progress there, I felt a little stifled... Whereas before I could see the progress I had taken each day.

I was thinking how to do it, and decided to just upload the contents of my exercise folder to Github. Mostly as a mark of my own progress, but also for anyone to poke around who might be struggling on the same course, or just looking for alternative solutions, or whatever. At some point I intend to give the full contents human readable comments for each line (at present maybe three quarters of the files are fully commented).

Needless to say, I'm mostly loving the book, and felt the end of the first section of the book (up to exercise 26) was the perfect time to upload my progress so far. Even though most of the information in those exercises I already knew, what sets the course apart is it fully deconstructs each new topic you over over a number of exercises, so you know inside-out how to implement it before moving on. The focus on forcing you to type it rather than just copying and pasting is annoying initially, but it gives me a better understanding of the code line-by-line and what it should look like (although I'll tell a secret, I didn't do things like memorise my own dictionary, it seemed overkill when I was also commenting line-by-line and hadn't run into anything I needed to look up).

Again, the idea of "trying to break the code" seems non-sensical to me, as there are an infinite amount of ways to break it... Trying to aim for collecting many different kinds of errors seems tedious as well. Instead, I've been trying to mod and hack the code with as many of the skills I've learned as possible and still keep it working... e.g. adding lots of user inputs, moving repeated lines of code into functions, doing the same thing a different way with other things I've picked up from my other attempt to learn Python. It seems akin to taking apart an engine and putting it back together in order to learn the mechanics of it- and I think it's great.

My exercises from the course are available on GitHub.. Also, the course I am now following is "Learn Python The Hard Way" by Zed A. Shaw