It must be a daunting task to harbor lucid grand dreams and be held back by lack of skills in the specific domain of interests.

That’s how I was, a little few months back. It was infuriating knowing how well you can articulate oneself in a crowd full of programmers and be the laughing stock in the hackathon that year. That’s when I felt the pain of vision versus execution. I knew & was validated by others that my ideas were the best in the room, yet; without a viable prototype it was heresy in this parts of town with the geeks!

That is why it was inevitable; actually, the dream had come back full circle now to full fruition, and that meant; to get down in the muddy waters and get dirty!

Prior to my debut reading of “Learning Python,” by Mark Lutz, I had fully completed three tutorials on Python with little syntax sticking in; especially when I was done with the basics of types & their operations. So the imposter syndrome haunted me for weeks!

Learning Python was nothing but uneasy. Fortunately for me; I had a tenacity to get the work done; to yield a higher purpose. (On a light note, the next hackathon I’ll go to; I already feel bad for the other contestants, cause this time round, I’ll have the entire arsenal toolkit on my pocket).

The crisp and elaborate writing of this book was nothing but a novice’s paradise. The ideas are all in a sequence easy to grasp with the right attention span to follow through. Most times when reading it, it felt like Mark Lutz was their with me on my study desk building with me step by step as I read it. That just showed the experience he had as a Professor teaching Python for decades upon decades.

There were times I hit a wall because of sheer nature of the concepts explained or rather my attitude towards those concepts: for instance; I really hated working on the standard output stream(stdout)… I can’t tell you how much I frowned when I had to open the Python Interactive Prompt to do work on files! It was a nightmare for me since most times nothing worked out as expected.

Then another moment, I got stuck with recursive functions, a bit of lambdas, generators, operator overloading, exceptions and decorators alongside metaclasses! Luckily enough, I knew my attitude was what was misplaced and not the nature of the book; so I had another run on those concepts and they flowed in with such ease.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough! It literally was a life saver, it boosted my confidence on all I had already learnt via Udemy’s course “Learn Python Programming Masterclass” by Tim Bulchalka and Jean-Paul Roberts. All in all, I think I’ll always find refuge on the precepts championed in this book with a great show of passion for the language by the Pythonista: – Mark Lutz.

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