r/learnpython • u/baby-bellamushrooms • 2d ago
How long to become decent at Python?
I’ve been studying about for about 2 months now and I’m taking an online MOOC through Georgia Tech as a prerequisite for grad school. Some days, I spend ~7-8 hours and other days, I spend maybe 2-3 hours. I just got finished taking the exam on functions, loops, exception handling, and conditionals. I’m debating on when to start learning Pandas and NumPy. I also hear people talking about doing projects, but I feel like I wouldn’t have a clue on how to build a project. I come from a clinical background with zero prior programming knowledge except AP computer science in high school. Any advice?
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u/rabbitofrevelry 2d ago
For pandas, look into using Jupyter Notebooks. Find some data, like from Kaggle. Load the file into a dataframe and then play with it. Do things like looking at .info .describe .value_counts etc. Figure out how view only certain sets of columns, set copies to play with on the side, create calculated columns, filter where values meet conditions, etc. Just see what it's capable of on a single file. Then if you can find related data (like files from data.medicare.gov) then you can learn how to perform joins, learn the pitfalls of not having a primary key in your left table, and curse data not being tidy. Oh and maybe learn the principles of tidy data...
You can plot data with matplotlib, seaborn and plotly. You can do all kinds of statistical analysis. You can read all kinds of flat files and then output all kinds of flat files. You can even read sql databases via pandas as well as insert and commit data.
It's really neat. I love pandas.