// the find
xiaolai/the-craft-of-selfteaching
One has no future if one couldn't teach themself.
A free Chinese-language book teaching Python fundamentals and self-directed learning habits, written entirely as a series of Jupyter notebooks. It's aimed at Chinese-speaking beginners who want a structured, from-scratch intro to programming rather than experienced developers looking for a library or tool.
The 'proof of work via pull request' mechanism is a genuinely clever way to verify readers actually did the exercises instead of just skimming — it doubles as their onboarding to git/GitHub workflows. Curriculum progression is solid: starts with basic values/control flow, builds to functions, then classes, decorators, regex, and BNF grammars, with a TDD chapter thrown in early rather than as an afterthought. Delivering the book as executable notebooks means code examples run inline instead of being static snippets you have to copy elsewhere.
Zero English content, so it's inaccessible to non-Chinese readers despite the topic being generic programming education. Repo hygiene is poor — .vs/ Visual Studio workspace files, stray scratch scripts (mycode.py, that.py, test-file.txt, results.txt) sit committed in the root, which is the kind of thing that shouldn't ship in a public teaching repo. The CC-BY-NC-ND license blocks derivative works, which sits awkwardly next to a workflow that explicitly asks readers to submit PRs modifying the content. This is a book, not code — no tests, no CI, nothing to adopt or integrate, so it only fits a 'weekly finds' email if the audience explicitly wants learning resources rather than tools/libraries.