Where to start with Python (with basic coding experience)?

Python
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Hello everyone! I am new here and this is my first post.

I found Mosh on YouTube and decided to give his Complete Python Mastery course a try. Before a couple of days ago I had zero Python experience. However I do have quite a bit of experience in MATLAB from university courses for my Mechanical Engineering degree.

In my experience it seems everyone kind of makes fun of MATLAB calling it a joke of a language and what not. However after completing 30% of Mosh’s Python Mastery course 90% of the information is very consistent with what I know from MATLAB except for syntax obviously.

Things like data types, if statements, while loops, for loop (nested for loops) are all concepts I am very familiar with as well as indexing variables in lists (in MATLAB we called them arrays). Most of my coding in MATLAB was used for solving complex mathematical models with a few fun little projects like a basic image editor/photoshop type program which was really just a bunch of matrix manipulations of the original image data to get your desired effect.

I guess my question is should I skip this basic mastery course and move on to more advanced topics? I’m sure later in the course Mosh will get into more advanced topics I am not familiar with but up to this point everything he has taught are concepts I am quite familiar with. It has really only been helpful for learning basic syntax differences and writing cleaner code so far.

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I do not recommend skipping personally. Granted, I did not take Mosh’s course and learned Python elsewhere, but I too had an ME degree with only some MATLAB and Fortran instruction when I started learning computer science. It takes some rewiring of your thinking. MATLAB (and its open source equivalent Octave) are very much about matrix operations (and math-y problems more generally), but they do use some standard programming principles (variables, if statements, etc) which is why some of the concepts make sense. There are still many concepts that will be new even in the “basic” topics.

Now, the main reason I do not suggest skipping is because Mosh likes to build on what he has already shown you. Future videos often call back to code that was written before and it can be very frustrating if you skipped that content. If you are getting bored, maybe you should just watch at a faster speed (eg. set playback to 2x).

All of that being said, you have to do what works for you so feel free to ignore this advice if you are not getting anything out of the material. Only you can really know what you need to learn.

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