The awesome part of python is the things you can do with it. You don't have to use indexes for strings.
The following will work (using slices)
def palindrome(n):
return n == n[::-1]
What it does is simply reverses n, and checks if they are equal. n[::-1] reverses n (the -1 means to decrement)
"2) My for loop (in in range (999, 100, -1), is this a bad way to do it in Python?"
Regarding the above, you want to use xrange instead of range (because range will create an actual list, while xrange is a fast generator)
My opinions on question 3
I learned C before Python, and I just read the docs, and played around with it using the console. (and by doing Project Euler problems as well :)
