One Quarter of the Way: 100 Days of Coding Python Bootcamp

After having applied the object oriented programming paradigm in a few lessons building games like snake and pong with Turtle the course deviates to explain how to read and write csv files and introduces the pandas library. On day 26 list and dictionary comprehension are introduced as powerful and elegant ways to create a list or a dictionary on a single line of code. I had learned about list comprehension before but have so far not really used it in my own programs as I obviously didn’t feel comfortable enough to use them. The benefit of having gone through the lessons in this course is that I was forced to revisit this concept and to use it to solve the programming tasks. Probably because I had learned about comprehension earlier and now coming back to them after a while the concept didn’t feel alien anymore and I managed to complete all the tasks without much effort. To me this illustrates that rehearsing with enough time in between is a really powerful way to master concepts. Except for a couple of tricks and the Turtle library which I had never used before this course has so far not introduced me to completely new knowledge but revisiting them and applying them in the lessons has certainly increased my mastery of a lot of concepts already. I feel more confident now to apply many of the techniques in my own programs. The most important one is object oriented programming and creating your own classes. I have always used the functional programming approach so far grouping functions with related tasks in separate modules. The main missing step being the absence of custom classes. I always felt that my code was not complex enough to benefit from custom classes but I am starting to see the light. Using classes makes it a lot easier to extend code later on with additional functionality or to apply code the code to other use cases so to speak. I have a few more days to go until I reach the end of the intermediate level after which follows intermediate+. That will take me to day 60 after which follows the advanced section of the course which seems to consist of projects to build up a portfolio.