python-fundamentals

Notes and exercises on Python fundamentals — the working-through of the language from its roots: types, structures, functions, the standard library, and the idioms that make Python sound like Python. It mixes written notes with runnable exercises: each concept captured in prose and then immediately proved by hand in code, so the understanding is earned rather than read. The repository's exercises are worked as TypeScript-era tooling looks on, which is to say: whatever the file says, the point is what running it teaches. It exists as an act of learning in public — the fundamentals walked again, slowly, on purpose, with every step written down.

Fionn mac Cumhaill cooked the Salmon of Knowledge for the poet Finegas, and in the turning of it burned his thumb on the fat — and when he put the thumb to his mouth, the wisdom of the thing came in with the scald. That is the whole method, and there is no other: the knowledge lives in the burn. So this shelf of exercises was built the same way — every fundamental of the Python tongue taken up by hand and tested against the fire of actually running, each little error a small scald taken on purpose, each note written down while the thumb still stung. The old texts say Fionn could answer any question by putting his thumb behind his teeth; the modern form is quieter — an exercise file reopened at midnight, and the answer arriving in the shape of a traceback resolved. The garden keeps the shelf mossed and green, because that is what knowledge prefers to grow on.