Python Ain't That Hard: Learn Python from the guy who's taught coding to grandmothers, cab drivers, musicians, and 50,000 other newbies.

by Mark Myers

Learn Python from the guy who's taught coding to grandmothers, cab drivers, musicians, and 50,000 other newbies.

"Mark Myers' method of getting what can be...difficult information into a format that makes it exponentially easier to consume, truly understand, and synthesize into real-world application is beyond anything I've encountered before." —Amazon reviewer Jason A. Ruby reviewing my first book, A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript

You're 4 times as smart as you think you are.

When you're taught the right way, you'll easily learn to code. Washington University research shows that a key teaching method I use—interactive recall practice—improves learning performance 400 percent. Incredibly, no other leading author has adopted this method. Yet it's the only way we've found to effectively teach people a computer language.

"I don't feel lost and I don't feel that I am forgetting things as I go along." —Amazon reviewer Leonie M. reviewing my second book, A Smarter Way to Learn HTML and CSS

Understanding is easy. Remembering is hard.

Computer languages are not inherently hard to understand, even for non-techies. Remembering is the problem. If you remember all of Chapter 1 through Chapter 10, you'll understand Chapter 11. But you don't remember. Though you read and read, most of it doesn't stick. You don't have a solid foundation to build on. Halfway through the book, it all collapses. That's when most people give up.

"I've signed up to a few sites like Udemy, Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, Lynda, YouTube videos, even searched on Coursera but nothing seemed to work for me. This book takes only 10 minutes each chapter and after that, you can exercise what you've just learned right away!" —Amazon reviewer Constanza Morales reviewing my first book, A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript

Technology to the rescue.

Research shows that you will remember everything if you're repeatedly asked to recall it. That's the beauty of flash cards. But technology offers an even better way to make information stick. With my book you get almost a thousand interactive exercises—they're free online—that embed the whole book in your memory. Algorithms check your work to make sure you know what you think you know. When you stumble, you do the exercise again. You keep trying until you know the chapter cold.

"Not only do the exercises make learning fun, they reinforce the material right away so it sinks in deeper." —Amazon reviewer Timothy B. Miller reviewing my second book, A Smarter Way to Learn HTML and CSS

You won't get bored or sleepy.

The exercises keep you engaged, give you extra practice where you're shaky, and prepare you for each next step. Every lesson is built on top of a solid foundation that you and I have carefully constructed. Each individual step is small. But all the little steps add up to real knowledge—knowledge that you retain.

I finally feel like I KNOW it and won't need to look up the syntax each time..." —Amazon reviewer J. Caritas reviewing my third book, A Smarter Way to Learn jQuery

Really, it ain't that hard.

Reviewing my books on Amazon, readers who've struggled with programming concepts like functions, loops, and scope write, "I had no idea these things were so simple!"

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244 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 30, 2017

About the author

Mark Myers is a former lecturer in the Communications School of Boston University. He develops interactive training and websites. He holds an A.B. from Harvard.

His professional focus is on using technology to reduce the effort and tedium of learning, primarily through interactivity. He is developing the "A Smarter Way to Learn" series on programming, a collection of instructional books paired with online interactive exercises. He runs the website http://www.ASmarterWayToLearn.com.

Mark, his wife Judy, and their three politically-active cats live in Taos, NM, where he cooks under the ghostly supervision of Marcella Hazan, reads extensively, plays showboat frisbee once a week, and longs for more episodes of "Breaking Bad."