New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Great question. I hope some other people jump in to comment, but here are my initial three thoughts:
0. Practise. To do is to learn. To learn programming, start programming. Reinvent the wheel if you have to; some of my first programs were for silly things (bulk renaming of files, generating thumbnails of images, and so on) that I could have found elsewhere, but I chose to re-create for my own edification.
1. Open source. It's the answer: it lets you learn from the code of others, and to leverage stuff that other people have built (like Pygame or Arcade, and even Python itself).
2. Know how to parse text. It seems trivial, but at least 50% of programming boils down to knowing how to compare and manipulate text.
3. Fearlessness. Just jump in. Don't get intimidated by "better" programmers than you.
Oh and a bonus one: keep reading my articles and the other great programming articles on opensource.com ;-)
Thanks, all. The next Python article in this series will be out very soon.