How to get started
With the internet, there are so many resources available to help you learn about something new - a new recipe, a new hotel, a new celebrity couple, and a new-to-you programming language. In fact, there are often too many resources and opinions out there, and finding the right place to start learning can be quite daunting. I’ve found this to be the case lately while trying to learn Python.
In addition to the book and tutorial I mentioned last post, I’ve also been going through another tutorial on how to write a roguelike game using Python. Despite the varied resources, I feel like I’m beginning to get a better grip on the language and its syntax.
But then I wanted to start working on an initial Flask API for Lists of Bests. Sounds somewhat simple enough, but once I started looking at documentation and tutorials, I quickly became overwhelmed. Flask by itself could probably do what I want, but I found references to all kinds of libraries to supposedly make things easier. There’s RESTful, and then RESTPlus, and another with the awesome name Marshmallow. And I’m sure that’s not all of them.
I think I may need to take another approach at this. Since I’m still quite new to the language, I think I’ll start with the most simple example first - without any extra libraries or distractions. I think if I can get my head around the basics, it will be much easier to add in those libraries later. And I may not even need them. I’ll attempt to document my learning into a couple of blog posts in the chance that someone else happens to have fallen into the library well like I did.
The excellent and oh-so-true comic by Alex Norris (@dorrismccomics).