Thanks for your answer gaming_mouse.
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There is more to add about Zed Shaw. I respect the guy and his passion, but I don't agree with the approach of the Learn the Hard Way series. The problems are, as I recall, sort of "how do you break this?" while I think it is better to "build this from scratch." It isn't like your first programs, although simple, won't be bug-ridden so much you won't need time to fix your own mistakes, plus you get the bonus of figuring out how to approach building a program (no matter how bad it is).
Watching him defend his evisceration of K&R is... sigh, and I'll leave the research to those who are interested.
That's an ad hominem, but just pointing out that he isn't the end-all be-all of programming opinions, which absolutely includes his statements on Python3 (even back then, IMO), vim, emacs, etc. I just think there are many better sources out there to learn Python and programming in general.
I guess this should show Zed's interesting advice, at times:
An IDE, or "Integrated Development Environment" will turn you stupid. They are the worst tools if you want to be a good programmer because they hide what's going on from you, and your job is to know what's going on. They are useful if you're trying to get something done and the platform is designed around a particular IDE, but for learning to code C (and many other languages) they are pointless.
... to justify his opinion further, he goes on into playing guitar...
Many people do it this way, but if you want to know what you're playing, then tablature is pointless....
IDEs are like tablature. Sure, you can code pretty quickly, but you can only code in that one language on that one platform. This is why companies love selling them to you. They know you're lazy, and since it only works on their platform they've got you locked in because you are lazy.
The way you break the cycle is you suck it up and finally learn to code without an IDE. A plain editor, or a programmer's editor like Vim or Emacs, makes you work with the code. It's a little harder, but the end result is you can work with any code, on any computer, in any language, and you know what's going on.
http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex0.html
I guess his biker boy writing style works for a lot of people, but at the end of the day, you have to think for yourself. There isn't any good reason to inject this sort of opinion on people, especially those who are using this material to start out in programming.
What he doesn't tell you is that a lot of guitar music is created by guitarists who don't know how to read music at all, and their music is actually transcribed by pianists, lol.