18 LEARN MORE PYTHON THE HARD WAY
The very rst thing you need to learn is everything. I know that’s intimidating, but as I mentioned in
the introduction, you are going to only practice three skills for the entire book. Each exercise is going
to enforce each of the skills as you complete other tasks. I may tell you to ”make a copy of the cat
command”, but what you are really learning is how to be creative. I may tell you to ”create a linked
list data structure”, but what you’re really doing is applying structured code review processes to your
programming practice. The secret of this book is that you are only using the projects and exercises as a
vehicle to learn three important practices: Process, Creativity, and Quality.
Ideally there’s nothing magical about these three concepts. Process is simply the steps you use to create
something. Creativity is simply how you generate and implement ideas. Quality is simply how you make
sure those implementations aren’t junk. The meat is in the application. How do you apply a process to
your personal development skills? How do you analyze whether you’ve been building quality software
or not? How do you take an idea and turn it into reality? All three of these are interconnected as you
need a process to help you get creative and then a process for ensuring quality, which also requires being
creative since no process works all the time. It’s a vicious, beautiful cycle.
The process for completing this book is simply this:
1. I will give you a goal of working on Process, Creativity, or Quality for a part of the book. Usually it
will be two concepts at a time or maybe just one. For example, in Part 1 you are working on creativity
by hacking on simple tools in a 45 minute fast session. You are also analyzing your starting process
since, if you nd it difcult to start, you won’t be very creative.
2. The beginning of each exercise will give you a prompt or goal to think about while you work on
the exercise. Each of these prompts will ask you to focus on one or more aspects of what you’re
working on. Exercise 4 in Part 1 gives you the task of simply implementing something, and then in
Exercise 5 you start to list the things that blocked you and try to eliminate them or make them more
efcient. Other exercises ask you to look at your physical environment and x anything distracting.
Each time you’ll think about these prompts and then work on the exercise, attempting to focus on
that particular task.
3. At the end of each exercise there are Study Drills that give you more challenges to work on. They
may be related to the project or they might be more about the process, creativity, or quality issue
you’re dealing with in the exercise.
4. Some exercises are ”Challenge Mode”. That means you are given a description of a tool to im-
plement, usually based on an existing Unix tool, and then told to implement it but without any
code to look at. There may be small pieces of sample code you’ll need to study rst, but usu-
ally there is no Python in these challenges. The solutions are available online in a Git project at
http://bit.ly/lmpthwsolve on Github.
5. Other exercises will be educational descriptions of something you have to implement based on my
code. These exercises will explain something, such as an algorithm, and then you are to implement
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