Help - think like a real programmer

Hi everybody,

I'm a "novice" in python. I have two questions :

1) I don't know if my learning's "plan" is good. I just start checkio after finish "codecademy.com". I don't know if I must begin a little project or continue with checkio until level XX and then read other tutorial about CGI, GUI, Networking, etc.. or continue check AND read other tutorial ? What's your experience ? What's your learning's plan ?

2) I don't understand how a programmer think. I mean when a want to count how many time a number is in the list, I use a for loop and a variable. But a real programmer use a list.count(number). How he know that ? Ok, there are many help and doc but how to search something I don't know if it exist ?

Thank you for your help and sorry for my (bad) English (I'm French)