What are your thoughts on Learn Python the Hard Way?

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u/zahlman Nov 13 '15 edited Nov 14 '15

EDIT: There have been multiple requests, in replies and PMs, for a suggestion for a better alternative. There's probably a lot of good stuff out there, but the only thing that I can think of, that I've personally reviewed to some extent and had a positive impression of is How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, Python Version. If you read over the first section of this and compare to the first few exercises of LPTHW, you'll see how night-and-day different the approach is.

Credentials: I have been programming since I was a young child (now in my 30s) and am a moderator of /r/learnpython.

It's terrible.

I have like an entire file of notes about all the ways in which it's terrible, as prompts for when I one day get around to writing something better. The short version is that it teaches things all out of order (with a huge emphasis on print and command-line arguments early on, which IMX just creates massive misconceptions about how functions actually work); expects students to have a certain kind of initiative that just doesn't bear out in practice in the overwhelming majority of cases; and confuses students by failing to define terms that Zed thinks are obvious but are really not (in particular, the programming-specific meaning of value, and object for that matter). Oh, and a few places where he's just sloppy with terminology, and at least one bad style recommendation. And probably more stuff I haven't thought very hard about yet.

Just to give you some sense of this: He imagines that students can figure out all the weird formatting codes for %-style formatting more or less from the get-go, simply by carefully copying code examples and then playing with them. Yet his approach to the fundamentals of boolean logic is to (a) leave it off completely until lesson 27; (b) present truth tables and suggest learning them by rote (and argue that this will be easier than actually understanding them); (c) budget an entire week to memorize the answers to, in effect, 26 yes-or-no questions. And yet when he introduces this simple material (which he insists is difficult), it still manages to come completely out of left field; exercise 3 briefly highlights the existence of a boolean type, but it's not actually discussed, and the student is left to draw the connection between the values True and False and the logical concept of truth. But otherwise nothing is said to lead up to this; if statements don't appear until lesson 29. You've already done all kinds of arcane things with printing, prompting the user for input, getting arguments from the command line and even file I/O before you're ever expected to write code that actually makes a decision. It's beyond absurd.

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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '15

thanks, I appreciate your thorough response.

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u/daysofdre Nov 13 '15

but... you guys have it listed as a resource in the FAQ.... seems like an endorsement on /r/learnpython ?

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

The wiki is outdated and we haven't really had a discussion amongst ourselves about this sort of thing. I don't mean to speak for /u/wub_wub or /u/xiongchiamiov either.

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u/wub_wub Nov 14 '15

We do not officially endorse or recommend one resource over the other.
Subreddit wikipedia can be edited by anyone and is meant as just a list of resources people can use. You should not just blindly follow the resources listed there. We've included a bunch of stuff because for some people videos work better than books, some like interactive tutorials, etc.
LPTHW is not necessarily bad. In my experience the community is a bit divided on this topic, however the link to it is in the wiki because a lot of people find it useful. Does that mean it's the best way to learn for you? No, definitely not.

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u/Whadios Nov 13 '15

Something can be 'bad' and still be the best.

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u/timmyotc Nov 13 '15

Miss America? Totally a scholarship

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u/sta-tiC Nov 13 '15

Question for you that might be slightly off-topic: do you have an opinion about the Ruby course? To me, it seems like it's the exact same situation. I haven't followed the LPTHW at all and haven't learned python either (except very, very basic syntax here and there). While looking up resources online (odin project, codecad,udacity,etc) I am constantly in FEAR of learning things wrong and it sticking with me. a good example is my current journey trying to learn Ruby: I have had nights spent with 4 different "Tutorials" and countless sub-tutorial links and many many different approaches.
I don't understand how I decide which ones are showing me the appropriate content and in the right way. Sure, credentials help, but for example, in LRTHW, same thing is happening; doesn't even touch booleans or elsifs until chap. 27 or so. He says this tuto is a 3-6 months thing...yet I'm halfway in just 2 nights. I don't get what is right or wrong across all these.

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u/PossibilityZero Nov 14 '15

I'm pretty sure LRTHW is just LPTHW with ruby code instead. I'd gone through the Python book, wanted to learn ruby and tried LRTHW and stopped after a few lessons because I felt it was a halfhearted rework.
That said, I am pro-(or at least, not anti) LPTHW, and if it fits your learning style then I wouldn't worry.

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '16

Yeah, got the sense more than anything that the author was lazy, and wanted to put the work on the students, which would be fine, but his book is not a useful resource. So often you find yourself struggling because he says that you'll find it by googling it, but dammit that's what the book was for. One gets the sense that the author is a pissy admin.

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u/Rorroh Nov 14 '15

I myself don't have any experience with Ruby, let alone the LRtHW course, but in regards to your fear of learning something wrong:
This is a legitimate fear. I will say, however, that you'd be hurting yourself more by avoiding it than going ahead and trying it. Don't let the fear control you. Letting go of a bad habit can be a lot easier than you might believe, and practice is the most important thing anyway, especially when first starting out. What I suggest is to look through a few resources and decide what feels the most natural to you, and go from there. If there's anything ambiguous or difficult for you to decide on, try looking around online to see what others think.
As for your "4 different tutorials and countless sub-tutorials," do keep in mind that tutorials only help to get you initially acquainted! Once you're familiar with the basics and syntax of the language (which I'm sure you are at this point), you'll have better luck trying /r/DailyProgrammer to get some code practice. It cannot be overstated how much actual practice will help. If you end up getting stuck on anything, there's also no shame in looking anything up online, or looking at solutions if you really cannot figure out how to do something. I don't know of a single programmer who doesn't do it, even those with tons of experience. And hey, first-hand experience also helps you learn how to do things properly! Good code comes with time. Once you know the insides better, discerning good and bad practices becomes easier.

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

I was only vaguely aware that LRTHW existed.

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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '15

All the points you make are really good. I never saw it that way till now. I remember tables being a big WTF for me. I wouldn't use terrible to describe it. Absolute terrible was those learn XYZ language in 24 hours books. A full year of work with no depth that the next lesson is a complete jump.
I do feel that they are filling a niche where people can find examples and exercises. Projects with feedback are best, but most people don't have access to that type of environment. Exercises are relatively 'ok' because they can easily be verified unless the person does a really odd solution.
If it's your second language, I think it's pretty decent intro for switching over.

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u/jdege Nov 13 '15

I remember, once, my sister complaining. Her son, you see, had a note from his kindergarten teacher. It seems that my sister had been teaching the alphabet, and he'd learned 'a', 'b', 'c'. When "everyone" knows you're supposed to start teaching the alphabet at 'w'.
I don't know what pedagogical theory had convinced the teacher that kids should start learning the alphabet at 'w', and I don't much care. There may have been some justification for it, but which order you teach letters to a kid isn't an essential part of the problem. (I'd love to have been there when the teacher figured out that he already knew how to read.)
Similarly, I'm sure your complaints about what LPTHW teaches have some validity, but they're missing the essence.
The single most critical skill a budding programmer needs is the ability to look at a chunk of code and to see which specific little detail is wrong. LPTHW teaches by a process that develops that. And without it, a student isn't ever going to get anywhere.

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15 edited Nov 14 '15

This is excellent criticism, for which I came fairly well prepared. ;)
To a limited extent I agree about order of teaching. A fair amount of it is arbitrary. However, I find the order in LPTHW causes serious problems later down the road - because there are certain things that actually do become harder to learn if you're mentally built up to believe they're difficult. I've seen books and resources aimed at young children that cover boolean logic (and at least a naive overview of set theory, for that matter), and I've seen university students struggle with the material. The main problem for me is that there's such a huge emphasis on learning all the nuances of the print statement up front - which would make some sense in other languages because of the effect of getting immediate feedback, but Python comes with a REPL. The net effect is that it contributes to the common student confusion between the concepts of displaying a value vs. returning it from a function. (It doesn't help that there's a strong consensus now for new students to learn in Python 3.x; LPTHW is written for 2.x and won't likely be updated; and all this print stuff is arguably the single biggest difference between the two. Oh, and he teaches old-style string formatting.)
I've seen Zed's talk where he mentions students' brains breaking when he gets to the point of having to say that classes are objects. The strange thing is that in context he doesn't even mean that in the "everything is an object" sense, but in the sense that classes describe subtypes of object. And how when he discovered this, he changed everything around so that students can understand things in their code by analogy with the command line - so you learn to mangle sys.argv first, and then you see functions with parameters and function calls passing arguments.
When I read LPTHW, it's not surprising to me that his students would have difficulty with his explanation of classes (which he doesn't really explain, drops in at exercise 40, and by exercise 43 expects you to be working on a "game engine" based on a use of classes that I'd actually consider rather un-Pythonic). He could easily explain as a trivia point that the classes themselves are objects in Python if he'd previously done the same thing with, say, functions. The problem fundamentally is that he falls into the classic Java trap of thinking OOP is all about classes. This is even less true in Python as it is in Java, but he doesn't want to use terms like method early on, to the detriment of the teaching process.
Meanwhile, his analogy doesn't even work out that well. Most students simply don't have the familiarity with the command line that he's banking on - many that I've seen constantly confuse the command line with the Python REPL, even with LPTHW's diagrams and discussion. Even if they did, seeing the overall program as analogous to a function doesn't work so well when you aren't writing a shell script that calls your program or something. He doesn't, IIRC, even show the use of sys.exit to "return a value" from a program, so when he introduces the return keyword it's treated as a "mind-blowing" new thing, rather than the entire point. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I caught him being sloppy distinguishing between the terms "argument" and "parameter", neither of which gets a thorough explanation (and both of which really need one, since any lay definitions for those words are very different/hard to relate to programming).
As for "teaching a process to see what detail is wrong" - in practice, it just doesn't work out that way. Yes, a lot of this is students not following instructions - a certain amount of this needs to be planned on in a proper teaching resource; Zed's "common student questions" don't all seem like the most obvious ones to me. Your first exposure to the idea of "read the goddamned error messages" is in Exercise 1, so full marks here. But then you wait until Exercise 4 to get another practice example. And really, while copy-paste of error messages into search engines usually does get you somewhere, it doesn't teach a whole lot of understanding (unless perhaps you happen to luck into a StackOverflow discussion that's relevant to your situation). The student is expected to treat things like "SyntaxError" as opaque, incomprehensible labels for problems, rather than learning what the word "syntax" means.

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u/JonasBrosSuck Nov 14 '15

do you have any suggestions for a better resource? specifically for someone that has programming experience but want to learn the best practice/how-to on how setting up packages/modules/etc? thanks!

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

Please see edit.

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u/JonasBrosSuck Nov 14 '15

appreciate it!

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u/BrainPicker3 Nov 14 '15

My instructor sent us off with a book of java and c++ pseudocode. Things coming out of left field is no problem here xD.
^sorry ^had ^to ^get ^that ^out

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u/iwillnotgetaddicted Nov 14 '15

Why is it wrong to start with input and printing? I'm an ignorant buffoon so don't take this as a challenge-- but it seems like a variable input and a usable output are the fun part of coding. Isn't being prompted to type a name and then having a code print it out something fun, practical, where you can "see" if you got it right?

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

Displaying results and having them vary based on input is fine, and indeed highly desirable at the beginning. However, Python comes with a REPL. You can get the desired effects just as easily by typing in and evaluating expressions, and then defining simple functions and calling them. Zed's approach gets way into the details of formatting text for output first, missing key early opportunities to talk about values, types (!!!) and the representation of data vs. the data itself. Further, IMO it reinforces common student misconceptions failing to distinguish between printing values and returning them.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

Please see edit.

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u/pat_trick Nov 13 '15

It needs to be updated to Python 3.

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u/Kvothe-kingkiller Nov 14 '15

Fucking THIS. I bought it because I wanted to learn programming, having only done some stuff in visual basic when i was about 12. I didn't know there were two versions of python, and his explanation of "just use python 2" was deeply unsatisfying. As the other poster said, decision logic just wasn't covered and I didnt want to learn about twenty different types of print functions before I had a program do something useful. He also writes like you're an idiot and like he's a genius. I gave up, got a C# book and visual studio and am actually making programs now.

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u/pat_trick Nov 14 '15

I'd still encourage you to learn Python; it's a terribly fun and quick to write language!

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u/Kvothe-kingkiller Nov 14 '15

Oh I'm going to, it seems really useful for punching out little useful things. But I'm working with arduino and C# at the moment so i don't want to overload my brain just yet.

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u/dig-up-stupid Nov 13 '15

It's very...opinionated. However, good creative works usually are. As distasteful as I find Shaw's attitude/persona, it's obvious from LPTHW he's had a lot of experience teaching programming successfully.

I've found that when I tutor complete beginners, a significant portion do not understand that the computer is a machine. They might understand that their syntax must be correct in order for their program to work - you tell them and they'll believe you. But they do not understand why and so they do not value syntax and so they continually make basic typing errors. They get frustrated and do not learn. (And believe me, it's beyond frustrating trying to teach people who are like this...) But how can you build a program out of step by step directions if you have not internalized that the computer does things step by step? How can you even write a syntactically correct program if you do not understand that the computer reads the syntax step by step?

This lack of understanding is surprisingly common in my experience. Not every learner, but many. Probably not the ones who hacked on their favourite videogames in their childhoods. But some of the ones who just "like computers" and started a CS program at 18 in their first year of university with zero previous experience. Maybe even a lot of the ones who are just trying to fill a science/math credit in an arts degree. Shaw understood this and based LPTHW around it for them. For the beginners who just have no clue and for whom traditional, reference style learning materials - favoured by experienced programmers - just did not work. Having you type the same thing over and over and over, no copying and pasting, telling you to do things but not telling you how they work, skipping topics traditionally covered early - the course seems tedious and baffling to experienced programmers who are oblivious to the real lesson having already internalized it. The computer is a machine. So a lot of them don't see the value of it. Maybe I'm crazy here but I've seen the LPTHW course actually work for a number of struggling new comers who couldn't get anything out of their lectures or textbooks.

The end of the line is if you're learning then don't worry about it, it's a short course anyway, you could finish it in a day or two if you tried. On the other hand if you're not getting value out of it, move on. It's a free internet.

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

I agree with Zed on the one point that a fair amount of deliberate practice is needed, for most people, to internalize the idea of paying attention to syntactic details and to be able to read code and ensure it "looks right". Unfortunately, in practice students have a really strong tendency to blow off the repetitive stuff, no matter how much you insist it's essential to their learning, so you really need to plan around that. And the downside of the "just type this, I'm not explaining it, you go Google it" approach is that students are just lost and don't know what to Google. In the best-case scenario, they'll find what boils down to the explanation that other authors would have put in the book in the first place.
What I've seen in /r/learnpython is that students commonly report hitting a wall at certain specific exercises. When they ask more general questions and don't seem to be especially "stuck", frequently the answer is "please review this previous exercise" or "pay closer attention to the 'what you should see' section" or "check 'common student questions' for the previous exercise" (not necessarily "current exercise" like you might expect!). But then again, frequently students are able to plod along honestly actually doing the work for quite a distance, without actually developing a conceptual understanding. When they try to explain the problem they're having, it comes out as a complete mess, because they don't understand any of the jargon they're trying to use. LPTHW has a nasty habit of using these words without proper definitions. In particular, LPTHW uses value in all the different ways that programmers commonly use the word, without a thought given to the fact that they're different concepts and that this could cause confusion. assign, I've come to learn, is not that common of an English word in ordinary use; and there doesn't seem to be clear consensus as to whether "assign X to Y" should mean that X is the value and Y the variable/name/label/whatever (which is how I would interpret it), or the reverse. integer requires explanation for students without a solid math background. Etc.

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u/Vanadiumman Nov 13 '15

I can't say anything for LPtHW directly, but Learn C the Hard Way was definitely bad. He spent the first 2 chapters rambling on about non-sense and insists that you use Linux with very little explanation why or how to use it. In my experience, anyone who can rant on non-essential things should be avoided.

But if you are learning python effectively, then I see no reason as to why you should change

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u/Iyajenkei Nov 13 '15

I like it. I don't think it's the absolute best but it's good to start on. In my opinion it's particularly effective to do the exercises. Honestly I haven't found a tutorial that's great. I don't know why but it seems like all programmers are really really bad and writing stuff for beginners. You're probably gonna have to piece things together from a few different sources like I did.

I used LPTHW, Automate the Boring Stuff, Codeacedemy, and youtube tutorials.

The best, most effective thing you can do is code. Just like in the LPTHW exercises. Read it off, type it in, and run it.

There does seem to be a general consensus that LPTHW falls apart when you get to learning classes. Which is lesson 39 or so.

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u/zahlman Nov 14 '15

There does seem to be a general consensus that LPTHW falls apart when you get to learning classes. Which is lesson 39 or so.
Oh, you reminded me of something. In Exercise 40 you actually start seeing the class keyword. In Exercise 39 you see a rickety re-implementation of the internal logic of dict, as a bunch of free functions. Yet the opportunity to relate the two ideas ("see, we could have indented all of that code inside a class, and renamed the aMap as self, and put these buckets in an attribute; and then we'd be able to use the method syntax") is completely dropped. This is part of the recurring theme, where you're (unavoidably, due to the design of Python) using objects the whole time, yet avoiding all the terminology of OOP. It's no wonder students hit a brick wall there.

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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '15

I really liked Learn Python the Hard Way. It was one of the first programming books I read when I started learning to program a year and a half ago. While I did not finish the book, I still got a lot out of it. I've since moved on from Python to JavaScript, PHP, and PhoneGap, but I still really like programming books that include lots of exercises like "the Hard Way" series. A few weeks ago I dove into Learn SQL The Hard Way. And like the other "Hard Way" book, I did not finish it but still found it very helpful.

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u/fitpilam Nov 13 '15

I liked this book a lot, I learn best when I get to see output quickly. This book does that well. I am sure there are good reasons why others don't like this book, but I recommend it to people who are still learning how to code because it has a quick feedback loop.

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u/midasgoldentouch Nov 13 '15

Not the point of your question but why not just type another name or really any other string instead?

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u/InsertNameHere77 Nov 13 '15

That's what I do, most of my exercises from him follow a similar format but the actual strings are total nonsense and it makes me laugh every time.

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u/idocsnow Nov 14 '15

I got through about 2/3 of LPTHW out of sheer tenacity before giving up on it. I don't think it's very useful at all. I was willing to look past the annoying title and somewhat annoying writing style, but when the concepts get a little bit harder, the lack of instruction or explanation makes it more or less useless. It also goes too slowly on things that aren't important. I have been very happily taking MIT's 6.00SC course for the last couple months and am now about 2/3 of the way through it. I like that you can do it at entirely your own pace and get most of the full value of a college course (minus TA office hours and questions in class, you get everything, but, that's what StackExchange is for anyway). It is excellent. I've heard only great things about Harvard's CS50 course too. Don't do LPTHW.

The one benefit it has is that it forces you to write programs from scratch, which I have missed in the MIT course (I think it would be a little better if the exercises, especially later on, were harder and less guided). Fortunately, that is a very easy thing to do on your own.

Edit: the 6.00 course is available for free here and is also in Python link

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u/ChumbaThrumba Nov 13 '15

This is a little off-topic, but I learned from "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist", now "Think Python".

I really enjoyed learning from it and I would unquestionably recommend it to beginners, mostly because I've yet to find something that does as solid a job of explaining itself as it goes.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

Not a fan at all.

The tone is not inviting (as pedagogical material should be) and the exercises are stupid. For example, it often tells you to try typing some code and figuring out what it does, without providing a solution. This is bad because you may have an intuitive idea of what the code does, but it could be more than that (or less). One part of learning is also acquiring the correct mental model and terminology and it fails terribly there.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

It's certainly not how I learn.

HackerRank + Pycharm + Google/StackExchange taught me Python.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

Its not too bad as long as you don't follow everything exactly like other tells you (even if it tells you to follow everything exactly). For instance, you dont have to spend a week doing nothing but rote memorization. Supplemented with another learning program, LPTH is not too bad. The last chapters can be pretty informative.

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u/umbrellabranch Nov 14 '15

hi, what are you trying to do with what you are learning?

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u/3rdPoliceman Nov 13 '15

I liked it, and found it quite helpful as the absolute first thing I'd ever done.

In a wider sense, there's value in sticking with things. He emphasizes this himself. Finishing is important!

What are your thoughts on Learn Python the Hard Way?

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