Basic Python course doesnt prepare student enough for LOGIC needed for Collection Exercises, Logic tutorial elsewhere???

Oh yes, please, I would love if you would explain :) thank you so much for posting the new code. I'm still trying to get the hang of this, and this challenge had me perplexed. Thanks for your help!

Okay so let's go through it line by line.

def string_factory(dicts, string):
  list1 = []
  for dictionary in dicts:
    list1.append(string.format(name=dictionary['name'], food=dictionary['food']))
  return list1

1 - Creating the function string_factory and giving it two parameters, a set of dictionaries and a string. We place these inside parentheses and make sure we end the line with a : colon to let python know a function starts here. (I say this as most of my errors come from non-closed parentheses or a lack of a colon..)

2 - Here we create a new list called list1, which is currently empty but it will store all of the formatted strings at the end of this

3 - We create a loop that will go through each individual dictionary in our list of them.

Let's look at this a bit as it is an important part of programming, we can use a while or for loop for this. A while loop does something until a condition is met, a for loop iterates (goes over/through) every item within something until there is nothing left to see. So a for loop would be the best.

4 - This is the line that formats the string, I'll explain it in pieces and summarise at the end.

Firstly, we get list1 and call the append method to append each item to it, basically we just add whatever the string is to the end of the list.

Then we get the string and call the format method, allowing us to place the value of each key in at the right spot in the list.

In the parentheses we set the first item being formatted, name, to the value of the name key of the current dictionary, and then do the same for the food item

5 - Finally we have now finished looping over every item and have a full list of complete strings, so we return them.

So what did we just do?

We created a function called string_factory that takes a list of dictionaries and a string as parameters, it then creates a list of strings formatted with the values of each dictionary and then returns a list of them.

I hope this helped!:)

Thanks for your reply,

I did actually watch the videos several times, It is just syntax explanation and what the keywords mean. There is little talk on the fundamental programming logic required to solve the problems. I found several tutorials that were easier to build on logic, particularly Al Sweigards books which are free online, and include video tutorials.

you can find here: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

I have seen several other people comment on my exact problem as far as logic goes, so I think that if the Python Course is to be successful the Logic side needs to be more thoroughly explained in order to help a beginner out

I would agree with Philip and add that there is something missing in the majority of programming classes for the beginner. I am currently going through three online courses, including this one, reading multiple books and even taking a community college course on Python and ALL of them are missing some key steps in teaching the fundamentals of thinking like a programmer. I am continually having to resort to the community help sites to find solutions and find many others struggling with the same problems who have much higher point accumulations than myself. The challenge is not having a visual sense of what is being presented. That visual is an association of logic steps in a language that we can see in everyday language. Its like teaching English as a second language--you do it with associative pictures. Kind of like Scratch or Blockly. After all, most of us are coming from a GUI framework that is almost all built on icons and images...and then we are expected to shift suddenly to command lines and word abbreviations with a huge relearning curve in memorizing, but not fully "seeing" what is going on with all the coded words.

Well like I said, the syntax descriptions and theory behind all the programming concepts is great, it is the logic behind them? I understand what dicts, functions, and all the other keywords are.. But when the challenge happens, I don't know if the challenge is too difficult, but the task is requires a level of logic that i am unprepared for. It sort of assumes I would know how to plug this thing in there etc etc.. Having basically no practice with coding outside of a few very simple tasks to pass a value or function somewhere else.

In Learning Python the Hard Way and the book mentioned above, whether through handholding or lots of practice the logic becomes more clear, and the whole "thinking like a programmer" becomes slowly more clear.

I love these treehouse courses and I believe I can finish these challenges, but at this point I think unless I want to rely solely on the forums help, I would have to attempt some other tutorials/books first and come back to it

Josh, thank you for being persistent. So...maybe start with how you would go through the steps of solving a treehouse challenge to a kid? No computer jargon or fancy terms. Just picking apart a challenge that has multiple steps. Do you start with psuedo code? What does that specifically look like? It is one thing to find all the solutions in the many community helps. It is quite different to break it down into everyday non-assuming language that can be built on later with the keywords and functions that come later. There is something BIG missing between the challenge question and the code that comes later.

Thank you Josh for your detailed and thoughtful reply. Let me study this and I'll let you know how I'm doing.

I did think of a question relating to the above: you said, "then we take all the items within the item at the position and format them into the string." Can you explain this more? Are those items in "index"? And what do you mean by "the position"? Many thanks!

When I run this code in the challenge, I get "'type' object not subscriptable". I've changed the string and dictionary names to reflect what you've named them here in this example. The code is below. Have I made a transcription error that I am not seeing possibly? Or is there another reason why it would give me this error? Thanks!

my_dicts = [
    {'name': 'Michelangelo',
     'food': 'PIZZA'},
    {'name': 'Garfield',
     'food': 'lasanga'},
    {'name': 'Walter',
     'food': 'pancakes'},
    {'name': 'Galactus',
     'food': 'worlds'}
]

my_string = "Hi, I'm {name} and I love to eat {food}!"

def string_factory(my_dicts, my_string):
  string_list = []
  for index in range(len(my_dicts)):
    string_list.append(my_string.format(**list[index]))
  return string_list