Question

I'm feeling very inspired yet slightly inept. These MIT courses are very inspiring to me, but i did not have any sense of how to programatically solve the 1000th prime program from watching the video and seeing the PDF assignment. That made me feel a bit inept as i was reading the forum and seeing that people were like these are the values and this is how you run the loop to the 1000th prime. I felt like i missed some of the material. I'm confused on the statement i saw in the forum - for x in range(2, 11, testnumber): Can someone explain that?

Answer 1

You don't have to feel inept. As any other field of the human knowledge, some people are more inclined to understand it than others, but anyone can make it to a decent level if he perseveres and keeps asking for help. (Oh, what a wonderful sentence I made! Since I'm french, I hope it makes sense in English too :-) ).
So, I don't know where you took this example from, but that's what that "for x in range(2, 11, testnumber)' means:
I want a variable x to enumerate through all the values starting with 2, up to 11, with a step which is the value of the variable testnumber.
And for each different value of x, I want to make a process defined inside the for loop (else my loop is completely useless).
You could try this program to visualize the result:

testnumber = 1
for x in range(2, 11, testnumber): print x

And give to testnumber different values, just to see the results.

Answer 2

there are readings as well as lectures - they are a must - there is a link in the upper left section of the course maon page. The Tutorial in the Python documentation is indispensable - the documentation should have been installed on your computer. http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html
How to think like a computer Scientist is a good start

Answer 3

Thanks for the support! I have some programming experience from work and was frustrated after trying to solve the problem from lecture 2. After watching Lecture 3 I felt a bit better as people in the class didn't have answers for the teacher as he was asking for solutions to one of his problems. I am trying to get some of my fundamentals learned. As i look at code sometimes i just see things i don't get and that havn't been explained to me from the class videos . I will keep trying. I love the fact that many of the coding ideas i have other people have thought about and amazingly they are often willing to help others!!!

Answer 4

feel easy.