PythonMonk – Learn Python in the browser

Interesting, however I feel like learning to code in a browser (even if it's JavaScript) doesn't work.<p>Sure, you may learn how to do a for loop or how variables work. But, you don't learn how to <i>actually</i> use the language. Setting up a development environment, and understanding how everything is connected is much more important.<p>Let's say you ace everything here, on CodeAcademy, etc. You still can't actually build anything.<p>(For more on this, see this article from HN a few days ago: <a href="http://blog.zackshapiro.com/want-to-learn-to-code-start-here" rel="nofollow">http://blog.zackshapiro.com/want-to-learn-to-code-start-here</a>)

The first thing I always try on sites like these is stuff like this:<p>__import__('commands').getstatusoutput('ls /')<p>or<p>__import__('subprocess').call(["ls", "-l"])<p>which gets blocked by the interpreter somehow with<p>exceptions.OSError - [Errno 11] Resource temporarily unavailable<p>I'm curious as to how you managed to do this - I've always been interested in how to sandbox something like this.

This is beautiful and the usability is great. But can anyone recommend some online interactive Python learning that starts at the intermediate level? I need Pai Mei to whip my sorry skills into shape, starting with OOP, sockets, image handling, and maybe data persistence?

"Your turn now - go on and change the following code to compute the sum of the numbers 1 through 5."<p>If you input 15 and submit, it says the answer is correct. Do all online code courses just check for the retured value?<p>How do these services deal with someone running sum(i for i in xrange(1000000000000000000))?

Tried the test to define unique. Wrote<p><pre><code> def unique(s): return list(set(s)) </code></pre> and it gave assertion errors. Nice presentation ... but incorrect Python implementation.

Both GitHub and Google signins failed for me and I lost progress in the first section. May just be the work network; I'll try it at home.

Seems like there is a bug over here <a href="http://pythonmonk.com/learning/books/17-python-primer/chapters/98-conditional-expressions/lessons/240-conditional-expressions" rel="nofollow">http://pythonmonk.com/learning/books/17-python-primer/chapte...</a><p>"Evaluates to True when age is 40 and name is "Bob" , which should be fine i think.

I think this is a great way to get beginners / students coding, but the end product might be what we now know as "bolt-on" engineers. They put components together and build beautiful functional products, until it breaks and they have no idea what's "under the hood"

This is really cool. I think the assertions that this learn-in-the-browser thing doesn't work is because folks on HN have seen so many entry-level courses at this point.<p>More interestingly, can I get transfer credits from Codecademy instead?

Looks like it sends each command to run on a server - I'm curious why not execute it in the browser? (There are a few solutions for that?)

It is 2013. Why are you teaching Python 2?

Very far away from Perl Monks.

This probably isn't for experienced developers, but it looks gorgeous.