1 Becoming a Pythonista

Welcome to Becoming a Pythonista! I'm happy to have you here for this journey, which I hope takes you to a place where you'll become not only a stronger programmer, but one who thinks like a developer and expresses those thoughts using Python.

Right away I want to clarify the use of a few terms, programmer, developer and Pythonista. You might think programmer and developer are interchangeable, certainly many job descriptions use the words that way. It’s easy to think that way because the two are related, but developing is a superset of programming. A programmer is very focused on creating program code, using technology in that process and implementing designs. A developer can, and often does, all of those things as well, but additionally thinks about the bigger picture. This includes the architecture of larger applications, the design to achieve it and pulling all the disparate parts together to implement it.

If you've read material online in the Python community, you've probably seen the term Pythonista. This is an endearing team in the community to refer to ourselves and others who are enthusiastic about Python..

1.1   Who is the intended audience?

1.2   Being a developer

1.2.1   Solving Problems

1.2.2   Process

1.2.3   Your Customers

1.2.4   Commitment to Learning

1.3   Reaching goals

1.3.1   Thinking like a developer

1.3.2   Building Applications

1.4   Using Python

1.4.1   The Syntax

1.4.2   Variables

1.4.3   Programming Paradigms

1.4.4   Creating Maintainable Code

1.4.5   The Language Community

1.4.6   The Developer Tooling

1.4.7   Performance

1.5   Version of Python to use

1.6   Summary