The Craft of Self-Teaching is an open book written in Chinese, aimed at people who want to learn how to learn, and specifically, how to teach themselves new skills, with coding used as the primary example. The central argument, stated in the description, is that people who cannot teach themselves have no future. The book is structured as a series of interactive Jupyter Notebooks, documents that mix readable text with live, runnable code, so readers can experiment directly as they read. It covers three broad areas: the mindset and methods of effective self-teaching (why self-learning matters, how to read to actually absorb knowledge, deliberate practice); a practical introduction to Python programming (values, control flow, functions, strings, data structures, files); and deeper topics (object-oriented programming, writing reusable functions, testing, recursion, and regular expressions). Beyond the Python content, the book addresses how to avoid common learning pitfalls, how self-learners should engage with communities, and what to do next after finishing. It includes appendices on setting up a development environment and using version control tools. The book is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, meaning it can be shared freely for non-commercial purposes but cannot be modified. It is delivered as Jupyter Notebooks, also available in a Markdown version. Written in Python/Jupyter Notebook format, and primarily in Chinese.
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