The bridge keeper and coding

In the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is a scene where in the heroes come across the dreaded Bridge of Death.  It's spooky and the bridge is guarded by the bridgekeeper who asks three questions.  One of which is "What is the average air speed velocity of an unladen swollow?"  The king answers "An african or european swollow?" The bridgekeeper suffers the punishment of his own fate when he doesn't know which he meant.

I feel like this is an accurate analogy to learning Python.  For me anyways, almost a fake it till it works... I have pseudocode and then it comes time to implement and well... I keep hammering until I get desired result.  Everyone tells me, oh that's normal but in the words of Raymond Hettinger, "There's got to be a better way."

I went through sololearn's program for python.  It's not terrible and certainly covers the basics fairly well.  There's other sources as well, I recommend "Automate the Boring Stuff" by Al Sweigart. 

However, I've started expanding into what are sure to be, at least for me, a step or two past beginner.  When you start you learn different basic terminology and functions, it's fairly straight forward.  Though data types and the things  you can do with them are... a more complex subject than was covered in that particular primer.

This week, and I have no mastered it by any stretch, but I read a great blog post explaining pathfinding using the A* algorithm.  I'll link it below.  I have looked near and far and didn't quite understand it as everyone kept pointing to code and not really explaining it in a way that I could grasp. My shortcoming I'm sure.

Now I'm off to learn procedural generation and I'm not sure if I'm doing it right but ... we will see. I will post what I come up with later.  That's the one thing about being self taught is that I don't know what I'm doing right and wrong.

https://medium.com/@nicholas.w.swift/easy-a-star-pathfinding-7e6689c7f7b2