New to programming... Python a good start?

[TwoToedTurkey]

Greetings!

The title says it all!

Any suggestions on a good starting language? I have found a few resources that say Python is fairly easy to use, yet is robust enough to handle most applications.

Any tips, tricks, ideas, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[v0id]

Python!

Yes, Python is one of the best beginner languages, in my opinion. There's other languages there's pretty easy to learn, and use, such as Pascal, but a language such as Pascal is not as powerful as Python is.

Python is easy to install, easy to use, easy to understand, and is still a good and robust language. That's all what a beginner in the programming world needs. Python also have a big user database, so it's easy to get help, find tutorials, guides, articles - and new libraries.

Python isn't a fast language, but it can still handle quite big application, also like databases, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), etc. Many beginners in Python expects Python to compile into an executable file, but Python is an interpreted language - so in the official release this isn't possible. But there's third-party application such as Py2Exe, and other of that kind, that makes Python scripts into executable files. The executable files is pretty big though, because it needs to include the whole Python runtime environment.

All in all, I would say Python is a good language, and I've used it by myself for a long time. You can choose to move on later, to a language such as C or C++ there's more powerful, but Python is good enough, so you could use it the rest of your life.

If you're planning to learn Python you should start out with visiting there official website. There you'll find the Python download, and afterward you can read the official Python tutorial, which include a lot of information. It's written by the author, Guido Van Rossum, so he knows what he's talking about.

Now I'll just say, welcome to CodeCall, TwoToedTurkey!

[paddy3118]

Originally Posted by TwoToedTurkey

Greetings!

The title says it all!

Any suggestions on a good starting language? I have found a few resources that say Python is fairly easy to use, yet is robust enough to handle most applications.

Any tips, tricks, ideas, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

You heard right! Python has excellent tutorials too at Python Documentation Index.

[Victor]

Originally Posted by TwoToedTurkey

Greetings!

The title says it all!

Any suggestions on a good starting language? I have found a few resources that say Python is fairly easy to use, yet is robust enough to handle most applications.

Any tips, tricks, ideas, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I started out with Python and moved onto C++. V0id is right, Python is an excellent language to begin learning. There is plenty of programmers out there for it, plenty of forums to help you with things. The only reason I started learning C++ was because the software to convert scripts to an executeable (Py2exe and Pyinstaller only ones I used), the exe is just too big. A simple hello world program:

print "Hello World!"

when using Pyinstaller outputs a 1.27mb exe. Py2exe output a directory that's 3.56mb. Just want to warn you if you plan to build applications you intend to distribute. Otherwise, Python is my favorite language