Do you have any recommended resources for someone learning Python as their first language?
You know, I don't - I picked Python up as my fourth or fifth major language, and by that point I already knew enough of the basics that reading the official Python Tutorial was plenty helpful. I imagine if you've never done programming at all before that it's kind of dry, though.
Still, it's a pretty good resource so it might be worth a look. If it comes across as too arcane, too dense, and just a real slog, then I wouldn't be discouraged. Even the introduction starts blabbing on about "data types" and "classes" and other jargon that I wouldn't expect a neophyte to understand.
I'd recommend against things like w3schools or other weird SEO sites, because a lot of them have pretty outdated and outright weird suggestions on how to do things that don't really line up with actual real-world ways to get stuff done. Python is a really popular language for machine learning (and now "AI") and data science, so there's a lot of resources out there geared towards people who aren't and do not want to be programmers. That's totally fine, but it's often written in a way that's geared towards just scooting you along to your next task and not really teaching you how to program. That's pretty reasonable for some folks, but I find these resources are often written with a pretty distorted view of what things are and can be really subtly wrong in ways that might confound later on.
(If, that is, there is a "later on".)
So, it depends on the person, I'd say. I have a hard time learning from references until I'm pretty deep in the weeds, but some people like that sort of thing. Other folks really like a guided project, like building a game or a little utility or something where there's an obvious goal you're moving towards to help you gain basic familiarity with the moving components in a way that always feels relevant to the task at hand.
I'd say anything is probably good as long as it looks interesting enough to hold your attention. Just ignore anything that still calls out Python 2 compatibility concerns - that's so long dead that there's just no good reason to fill your head with that stuff. Python 3.8 is currently the oldest release still supported, so just make sure whatever resource your following was published or at least updated sometime reasonably close to or after ~2019 or so.
(The 3.x versions are all very close in terms of their core features, but the further back you go the more likely you are to find resources written by dorks who think calling out Python 2 compatibility is a worthwhile thing. It isn't.)
I'll look around and see if there's anything I think is good, but I think it really does depend on what type of project a person wants to accomplish and why they want to learn. Like, if you want to make a ren'py game, maybe just starting with a ren'py tutorial and modding in extra features and stuff is the way to go. Or if you want to make a utility that checks musicbrainz for new albums from your favorite artists, maybe making a little script that downloads a JSON/XML file and figuring out how to parse it is the way to go, adding more bells and whistles as your patience permits.
One of my favorite ways to learn a language is solving the Advent of Code puzzles. They start off very simple and give you a pretty targeted task to solve that usually doesn't take a whole lot of complexity. They won't teach you anything about how to code, but it does give you little arbitrary tasks you can use code to answer, and sometimes that's Just Enough Framework for some folks.
"It all depends, I guess."
I'm always happy to answer questions about it, though. I may not be the very best teacher, but I do genuinely love to share what I know. Inbox is definitely always open for that sort of thing.
(And, for other followers: leave suggestions in the comments!)
