How Long Does It Take to Learn Python? (And Get a Job)

what's up everyone and welcome back to my channel this is kareem from afternerd.com and today i want to talk about some of the questions that i get asked a lot and i believe it's better for you to know the answers to these questions before you start learning python specifically these questions are should you learn python 2 or python 3 when will you be able to get a job how long does it take to learn python and what can you do with python so without further ado let's jump right into it [Music] okay should you learn python 2 or python 3 a few years ago i would have said learn python 3 but at the same time try to learn python 2 as well or at least learn python 3 and understand the differences between python 3 and python 2 and by the way there are major differences between the two and the reason for that is because python 2 is very popular and there are a lot of applications out there that are already written in python 2. so you as a python developer you might need to read python 2 code or actually write python 2 code yourself however as of january 1st 2020 python 2 has reached what we call an end of life maintenance what that means is the maintainers of the python programming language are telling you that they are no longer supporting python 2 there will be no more security fixes no bug reports no new releases for python 2 so if you're learning python today it's settled learn python 3 don't bother at all with python 2 anymore because python 2 is pretty much dead all right how long is it going to take to get a job this is actually a hard question it's not easy to answer a question like that because it depends on a lot of factors but i'll try to give it the best i can first of all there is a misconception that i want to clear up front when you're learning python the objective here is not to be a python programmer the job that you're getting at the end of the day is not going to be a python programmer or a python engineer there's nothing like that it's a software engineer so when you're learning python or c plus or java the objective is to be a good programmer a good software engineer not just good in a programming language this mindset is very crucial especially if you are starting out so understand that the reason why you're learning python or any other programming language is because you want to be a good programmer your job opportunities is not limited by the language that you choose to learn so keep that in mind with that out of the way i'll try to give you a road map for how i think the best approach is to be able to get a job after you finish level zero and level one in python and if you don't know what these levels are i will link down below to another video that i made that talks about all the different levels in python that will take you from being an absolute beginner to being proficient in python so if you're done with level zero and level one the best approach here is to try to get an internship or a job at a small company so you can start getting practical hands-on experience that is invaluable to your career and start honing your skills and applying all these pretty much theoretical classes that you've been to and the things that you've learned at this stage though it will be hard to get a job at one of the big tech companies because you're still not a good well-rounded software engineer you're just someone who basically knows how to code you only learned how to write basic code and how to do object-oriented programming which is crucial and it's important and you should be proud of yourself but it's not enough that doesn't make you a good software engineer as of yet so to grow further you really need to at least go up to level four to be able to actually target one of these bigger tech companies you can start you know getting interviews and and hopefully getting a job eventually but being a good software engineer is not just about being proficient in a programming language being a good software engineer means you are definitely good at programming but you also have fundamental concepts in networks fundamental concepts in operating systems data structures and algorithms and so on and so forth so the answer to this question is it really depends on you it really depends on how fast you learn if you get to this level fast enough then you are more than ready to start you know applying and hopefully you're gonna get that job and that takes me to the next question how long does it take to learn python or to learn the levels that we discussed before in python again this is one of the questions that depends on a lot of factors for example how much time you have in a day to dedicate to learning python or how fast of a learner you are how fast you learn new concepts so there doesn't exist an answer that will fit everyone but i'll try to give you a general non-scientific estimate about how long i think it will take to learn python so if we're talking about level zero and level one if you are proficient in another programming language if you're coming from let's say c plus plus or java and you're starting to learn python i would give it maybe like two weeks to a month max to learn level zero and level one the reason is python is much easier than other programming languages out there so if you're already proficient in other programming languages python is gonna be a piece of cake for you if you're an absolute beginner and python is your first programming language ever i would give it from three to six months and the reason why it's taking that long because you really should master these concepts remember that at this level or at these two levels you're not just learning python you're learning programming concepts in general so give yourself some time to absorb and internalize these concepts and i think on average it will take you from three to six months to actually master the concepts in these two levels for levels two three and four i would say give yourself somewhere from six months to a year and sometimes even longer than that because at these levels you're not just learning python you're actually learning fundamental computer science concepts as well for example networking concepts distributed systems concepts operating systems and data structures and algorithms okay so this will take time this doesn't happen overnight so be aware of that and plan accordingly and like i said in the beginning it really depends on how much time you have in a day to dedicate to learning these things and it also depends on how fast you learn all right let's say you already learned python what can you do with this programming language python is a generic programming language which means that you can use python to pretty much do anything you want so if you're worried that learning python is going to box you into a specific domain don't worry about it however python really excels at specific applications for example numerical analysis and data visualization there are a lot of libraries in python that are very popular in in that specific domain for example numpy pandas matlab plot all of these are libraries that are very popular very heavily used in that domain another thing is machine learning if you want to be a data scientist it's one of these cool things these days everyone wants to be a data scientist so if you want to be a data scientist python is your language for example one library that is very popular in the machine learning domain is scikit-learn and even if you want to write web applications libraries like django and flask can help you do that another thing you can use python for is as a scripting language for example you can automate some of the things that you do day to day using python so instead of going to something like bash for example you can use python which is in my opinion much easier i would choose python over bash every single day so yeah these are the things that are on the top of my head but i'm pretty sure there are many other applications that you can use in python but like i said python is a generic programming language so you can just use it to do whatever you want cool i hope you have a clear understanding now of what the expectations are before you dive in and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Afternerd

Views: 247,417

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Keywords: learn python, python for beginners, python tutorial, python2 vs python3, how long to learn python, how long to get a job in python, what is python used for, why learn python, python developer

Id: 1GqMpz77XlU

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020