Appreciation post: The $12 book that finally taught me why my loops were breaking

I've been messing with Python for about a year now and kept hitting the same wall where my for loops would just crash or skip over stuff. Last Tuesday I picked up a used copy of "Automate the Boring Stuff" for 12 bucks at a thrift store in Portland. The author explained how range() works in a way that finally clicked for me after like 3 tries. I spent that whole night rewriting old projects and fixing bugs I'd been ignoring for months. It's not fancy or new or whatever but man it saved me a ton of frustration. Has anyone else had a random cheap resource that just made something click out of nowhere?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix_adams6028d ago

That exact book saved my bacon too, same situation - I'd been copying loops from stack overflow without understanding them and the section on enumerate() was like a lightbulb finally turning on (even though I'd read the docs like five times before).

wright.jesse28d ago

Burned three days once because I thought enumerate() was some kind of fancy calculator function... felt real smart when I finally googled it.