A small update
Over the last few days, I've been reading through a long and extensive Python tutorial I found at python.org. It covered a lot of what I had seen before, but went into more depth than the other tutorials I've done and was a good use of my time. I have a better understanding of the complexities of the language now, and while I'm still a relative novice with this stuff I feel like I might be getting somewhere with it finally. This python.org tutorial was very different from the tutorial lessons I've done on datacamp.com - the interactive datacamp.com tutorials basically hold your hand while you work through them, to a point that I feel like I'm progressing through the lessons but not really understanding what I'm doing. The fill-in-the-blank lessons datacamp.com has aren't getting me where I want to go with this language. I bought another book, called "Fluent Python". I haven't started reading it yet other than the introduction, which is where I learned of the python.org tutorial. It's going to take me a long time to work through this book as it has over a thousand pages, so I'll be spending a little bit of time on it each workday for the next few months. I still don't feel like I am capable of writing good code from scratch. I can read and edit code others have written (I've been doing that for a while now), but coming up with useful code off the top of my head is still a major weak spot I have. Writer's block, I suppose. It makes me wonder if other people who have struggled to learn Python have dealt with the same thing. My vacation starts after I leave work tomorrow. I'm feeling a little burned out, so it is a welcome distraction but I think tomorrow is going to be a long day. I'm still planning on going to the gym after work, then going home and packing a bag. I'll be driving to Oregon early Tuesday morning, which should be a little fun. I hope the weather cooperates.