Some parting wisdom to my Python students (or: Go read Julia “b0rk” Evans’ ’zines!)

Last night was the final night of the Intro to Python Coding course that I’ve been teaching on behalf of Computer Coach for the past five weeks — Mondays and Wednesdays, 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m..

I’d like to congratulate the students! It’s not easy to spend four hours an evening twice a week learning something completely new and unknown to you, but the students did just that. If you’ve ever been in any of my Tampa iOS Meetup sessions, you’ve seen my teaching technique — you’re not passively watching slides, but coding along with me, and even experimenting, just to see what happens. That’s I what I did with the Python class — we entered code and saw what happened, hopefully learning along the way.

As a farewell present to the students, I sent them a copy of So You Want to be a Wizard, a little “zine” written by Julia “b0rk” Evans for programmers who are starting out that’s full of good advice. I hope it helps them through those moments that every programmer has, when nothing seems to work and all you want to do is throw your computer out the window. I’ve posted it here as well, partly because it’s full of good advice that even experts need to remember, and partly because I want to make sure that everyone knows about Julia’s works.

Even the table of contents lets you that that you’re in for a fun read:

Julia has a whole set of zines, some of which are free…

…and some fancier ones, which come at a reasonable price, even for groups:

Once again, congratulations to the Intro to Python Coding students!