Last night, as I was tippy-tapping on my iPad and retweeting weather updates and listening to voicemails and reviewing information about the next day I thought about how mundane the whole experience was. I was suddenly reminded of that time in 1973 or 1974 when my father showed me what was then an absurd purchase, a pocket calculator with bright green digital numbers, that could add, subtract, multiply and good grief, divide with the push of a couple of buttons.

From TV and movies I hear that the first heroin high is the best and probably the only one you’ll ever enjoy. Other than the first 10 hours of “Combat” on the 2600 and the joy of BASIC programming, I’m not sure technology will ever again excite me as much as that little box with glowing numbers.

A short, but hopefully growing list of free online resources that may help you learn Python. The default for these links is Python 3, unless noted.

Tutorials and Books

• Program Arcade Games with Python and Pygame
• Learn Python the Hard Way
• Learn X in Y Minutes (where X=python3)
• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
• Full Stack Python
• The Python Tutorial
• Test-Driven Development with Python
• learnpython.org

Videos

• Berkeley EE61A - Computer Science
• TheNewBoston (Python 2)

A short, but hopefully growing list of free online resources that may help you learn Python. The default for these links is Python 3, unless noted.

Tutorials and Books

• Program Arcade Games with Python and Pygame
• Learn Python the Hard Way
• Learn X in Y Minutes (where X=python3)
• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
• Full Stack Python
• The Python Tutorial
• Test-Driven Development with Python
• learnpython.org

Videos

• Berkeley EE61A - Computer Science
• TheNewBoston (Python 2)

And so after months of harping about how great it would be to switch from DarkBASIC to Python in my game design classes, the time has come to put up or shut up and start designing the class itself. It will be split in two, starting with Python and ending with JavaScript.

Now to figure out how all this is going to work…

Nobody knows you’re a pack of dogs, is more like it.

I wonder if my students could understand this process? Or if they’re even interested. This is so retro.

Much more to read at Mastering Markdown.

Next target could be paco.org, but I think I’d rather do idtprof.com.