Recently I decided to expand my programming horizons and learn the python programming language. While I have used python a little bit for classes in college and for a project or two at work I am by no means an expert. My question is as follows: should I bother with the 2.x releases or should I jump straight to 3.0? I am leaning towards 3.0 since I will be programming applications more for personal/learning use, but I wanted to see if there were any good arguments against it before I began.
Closures can avoid the use of global values and provides some form of data hiding. It can also provide an object oriented solution to the problem.
In general, it takes around two to six months to learn the fundamentals of Python. But you can learn enough to write your first short program in a matter of minutes. Developing mastery of Python's vast array of libraries can take months or years.
Yes, you can learn Python without any programming experience. In fact, Python is so popular in part because of its easy-to-use, intuitive nature. For people without any coding experience at all, Python is actually considered the perfect programming language.
Absolutely not 3.0 - 3.1 is out and is stabler, better, faster in every respect; it makes absolutely no sense to start with 3.0 at this time, if you want to take up the 3 series it should on all accounts be 3.1.
As for 2.6 vs 3.1, 3.1 is a better language (especially because some cruft was removed that had accumulated over the years but has to stay in 2.* for backwards compatibility) but all the rest of the ecosystem (from extensions to tools, from books to collective knowledge) is still very much in favor of 2.6 -- if you don't care about being able to use (e.g.) certain GUIs or scientific extensions, deploy on App Engine, script Windows with COM, have a spiffy third party IDE, and so on, 3.1 is advisable, but if you care about such things, still 2.* for now.
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