Question

Any programs or anything extra that isn't in this course that would be helpful?

Answer 1

You could try to integrate programming into your daily life. Figure out some things you do on a daily basis, and then try to write code that helps you do these things better/faster.

For example, I tend to keep extremely detailed records of my finances, because I'm a huge nerd that way. As a result, I'm very often keeping track of many different amounts and adjustments, so this is something I found I could do much easier with a program.

Now obviously, being a novice, you want to start small, as you certainly don't want to risk anything going wrong with your money! But fortunately with programming this is easy to do. For my program, I started small: I started with a program that simply tells me how much money to save. Now that I have this, I can take it a little further and further each time: I can make something that keeps track of my savings accounts in detail, which is interactive and modifiable. Then I could use the same or similar code to keep track of OTHER types of accounts, and then just put all of these together until I eventually have a program that handles every aspect of my finances for me.

I think, outside of using it as a vocational skill, trying to integrate programming into your daily life not only makes your life easier, but it's an extremely effective way to teach yourself even more. You not only learn to solve real problems with your code, but you're also forced to make sure it works (if you're going to rely on your own code, you're going to be sure to bug test it, right?).

Answer 2

Do you mean are there any programs you could download to help with the task of programming (like IDLE)? Or do you mean are there any other program-writing assignments you should try to do that would be instructive to the task of learning programming?

Answer 3

the Tutorial in the Python docs
Google
Wikipedia
Project Euler