My ‘wish’ – the people who are truly interested in recruiting newcomers to the world of programming would help in clearing away some of the clutter, not add to it – there is too much info to siphon through – have you looked at the package index lately? I’m not sure anyone with zero experience would know what package they may want to use in a new (first) app, and I don’t believe I have read anything that helps with assembling the right tools or making this kind of decision, of course if you have experience then “they” send you to the ‘package’ index, btw, it may be larger than the Library of Congress.

I read a bit about GUIs, both PyGTK and Boa Constructor were mentioned, but it looks as if they have been abandoned, as far as I can tell there hasn’t been news for either in a few years – I see this a often, abandoned efforts.

I have seen in the MS VS world efforts to include newbies into a project from scratch, so they can be in on the creation of a new app, from ‘idea’ to ‘end user’ – I wish an effort like this was available to a person with zero experience – using Python. I do like the wxPython crowd, the IRC channel is great, also, the blogs (including yours) are helpful. I recently registered for the Python Tutor mail list.

Bottom line, there are millions of bits and pieces that one can read and glean the greatness and usability of Python, but putting it together, the newcomer is left awash in a thousand options and no clue where to start – well, ‘hello world’ – of course.

This blog post was based on my own experiences being a newbie. When I was a newbie, I inserted myself into email threads and irc conversations, read everything I could about Python, and most importantly I hacked continuously and broke things mercilessly. From those experiences I was able to form questions that actually furthered my knowledge of Python, and I fed that new knowledge back into my hacking. That process basically still continues today.

So what are your questions? What have you tried? There are lots of resources out there which contain answers, but you still are ultimately responsible for the question!

Also, minor typoe in the article: “I’ve seen error at least once…”