magscientist14 said:
I have taken some free Python courses but have been thinking of buying a membership on a site like codeacademy or udemy to get access to more Python courses.
Any recommendations on which site I should pay for? I am looking to build a portfolio to showcase my projects to potential employers.
You can pay for the course, but there are a ton of YouTube videos that will give you the same experience. As said above, what specifically are you looking to do? I'm on the network engineering side of the house, so the style of Python programming I use is tailored towards that, but someone doing web development will have a massively different experience in Python.
What worked for me, but that may be different from what your learning style is, was just picking a project to do, and then start learning by doing. One thing to keep in mind, nothing you do is new. Someone has probably done it and the answer is on StackOverflow, or they may have a shared Git you can go through. Also, learn Git. I can't stress that one enough.
Use pip. So many times I was spending a ton of time trying to get some sort of output from data, when someone had already created a Python package that would have saved me a ton of time. IP address manipulation for example. It's a helluva lot easier to use us the ipaddress package and say "ipaddress(ip+1)" than taking the IP splitting it based on "." adding 1 and then outputting the new IP. Then developing logic in case the IP that adding 1 to, will result in a value over 255, then additional logic to account for that, etc. However, doing the latter helps later when there isn't a package for what you need, so it's a double edged sword.
