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What Is the Best Book to Read on Python for Beginners Mathematical Modeling

In this commodity, we highlight the best books for learning Python through a collection of book reviews. Each review gives you a taste of the book, the topics covered, and the context used to illustrate those topics. Unlike books will resonate with different people, depending on the style and presentation of the books, the readers' backgrounds, as well as other factors.

Python is an amazing programming linguistic communication. It can exist practical to almost any programming chore, allows for rapid development and debugging, and brings the back up of what is arguably the most welcoming user community.

Getting started with Python is like learning any new skill: it's of import to find a resource y'all connect with to guide your learning. Luckily, there'southward no shortage of first-class books that can help you lot learn both the basic concepts of programming and the specifics of programming in Python. With the affluence of resource, information technology can exist difficult to identify which book would be best for your situation.

If y'all are new to Python, any of the introductory books volition give you a solid foundation in the nuts.

Peradventure you want to learn Python with your child, or maybe teach Python to a group of kids. Check out the Best Python Books for Kids for resource aimed at a younger audience.

As yous progress in you Python journey, you will want to dig deeper to maximize the efficiency of your lawmaking. The best intermediate and avant-garde Python books provide insight to aid you level upwards your Python skills, enabling y'all to go an good Pythonista.

Afterward reading these reviews, if you still are not sure which book to choose, publishers oft provide a sample chapter or section to give you an example of what the book offers. Reading a sample of the book should give you the nearly representative film of the author's pace, manner, and expectations.

Regardless of which book nigh stands out, consider this anecdote from one of our book reviewers, Steven C. Howell:

"A favorite professor once told me, 'It doesn't affair which book you read first. It'due south always the second ane that makes the most sense.'

I tin can't say this has ever been the case for me, only I've definitely establish that a second reference can make all the difference when the get-go left me puzzled or frustrated.

When learning Python classes, I had difficulty relating to the examples used in the showtime two books I picked up. It wasn't until the third book I referred to that the concepts started to click.

The important lesson is that if you become stuck or frustrated, and the resources you accept are not helping, and then don't surrender. Await at another book, search the web, enquire on a forum, or only take a break."

All-time Books for Learning Python

If you are new to Python, y'all are probable in one of the following two situations:

  1. Y'all are new to programming and want to start by learning Python.
  2. You take a reasonable amount of programming experience in some other language and at present desire to learn Python.

This section focuses on the get-go of these two scenarios, with reviews of the books nosotros consider to be the best Python programming books for readers who are new to both programming and Python. Accordingly, these books require no previous programming experience. They offset from the absolute basics and teach both general programming concepts too as how they apply to Python.

Python Crash Course

Eric Matthes (No Starch Press, 2016)

"Python Crash Course" Book Cover

It does what it says on the tin, and it does it really well. The book starts out with a walkthrough of the basic Python elements and data structures, working through variables, strings, numbers, lists, and tuples, outlining how y'all work with each of them.

Next, if statements and logical tests are covered, followed by a dive into dictionaries.

Afterward that, the book covers user input, while loops, functions, classes, and file treatment, also as lawmaking testing and debugging.

That'due south just the beginning half of the volume! In the second half, you work on three major projects, creating some clever, fun applications.

The first projection is an Alien Invasion game, essentially Space Invaders, developed using the pygame package. You lot design a ship (using classes), then program how to pilot it and brand it fire bullets. Then, you design several classes of aliens, make the alien fleet move, and brand information technology possible to shoot them down. Finally, you add together a scoreboard and a list of loftier scores to consummate the game.

After that, the next project covers information visualization with matplotlib, random walks, rolling dice, and a little bit of statistical analysis, creating graphs and charts with the pygal package. You lot learn how to download data in a diverseness of formats, import information technology into Python, and visualize the results, besides as how to interact with spider web APIs, retrieving and visualizing data from GitHub and HackerNews.

The third project walks y'all through the creation of a consummate web application using Django to ready a Learning Log to rail what users take been studying. It covers how to install Django, ready upward a projection, design your models, create an admin interface, fix upward user accounts, manage access controls on a per-user basis, manner your entire app with Bootstrap, and then finally deploy it to Heroku.

This book is well written and nicely organized. It presents a large number of useful exercises every bit well every bit three challenging and entertaining projects that make up the second half of the book. (Reviewed by David Schlesinger.)

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Head-First Python, 2nd edition

Paul Barry (O'Reilly, 2016)

"Head-First Python" Book Cover

I actually like the Head-Starting time series of books, although they're admittedly lighter weight in overall content than many of the other recommendations in this section. The merchandise-off is the that this approach makes the book more convenient.

If you're the kind of person who likes to learn things one small, adequately cocky-contained chunk at a time, and you want to accept lots of concrete examples and illustrations of the concepts involved, then the Caput-First series is for you. The publisher's website has the following to say about their approach:

"Based on the latest research in cerebral science and learning theory, Head-First Python uses a visually rich format to engage your mind, rather than a text-heavy approach that puts y'all to sleep. Why waste your time struggling with new concepts? This multi-sensory learning experience is designed for the fashion your brain really works." (Source)

Chock full of illustrations, examples, asides, and other tidbits, Caput-Commencement Python is consistently engaging and easy to read. This volume starts its tour of Python by diving into lists and explaining how to utilize and dispense them. It then goes into modules, errors, and file handling. Each topic is organized around a unifying projection: building a dynamic website for a school athletic coach using Python through a Common Gateway Interface (CGI).

After that, the book spends time teaching yous how to apply an Android awarding to interact with the website you created. You lot learn to handle user input, wrangle data, and expect into what's involved in deploying and scaling a Python application on the web.

While this book isn't as comprehensive equally some of the others, it covers a practiced range of Python tasks in a manner that's arguably more than attainable, painless, and effective. This is especially true if y'all notice the subject of writing programs somewhat intimidating at first.

This book is designed to guide you through whatsoever challenge. While the content is more than focused, this book has plenty of material to keep y'all busy and learning. You lot will non be bored. If yous observe near programming books to be too dry out, this could be an first-class book for y'all to get started in Python. (Reviewed by David Schlesinger and Steven C. Howell.)

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Invent Your Own Estimator Games with Python, 4th edition

Al Sweigart (No Starch, 2017)

"Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" Book Cover

If games are your thing, or yous fifty-fifty take a game idea of your ain, this would be the perfect book to acquire Python. In this book, you larn the fundamentals of programming and Python with the application exercises focused on edifice classic games.

Starting with an introduction to the Python crush and the REPL loop, followed by a basic "Hello, Globe!" script, yous dive right into making a basic number-guessing game, roofing random numbers, flow control, blazon conversion, and Boolean information. Afterward that, a small joke-telling script is written to illustrate the use of print statements, escape characters, and basic cord operations.

The next project is a text-based cavern exploration game, Dragon'southward Realm, which introduces y'all to flowcharts and functions, guides y'all through how to define your own arguments and parameters, and explains Boolean operators, global and local scope, and the sleep() function.

After a brief detour into how to debug your Python code, yous side by side implement the game of Hangman, using ASCII artwork, while learning about lists, the in operator, methods, elif statements, the random module, and a handful of string methods.

You then extend the Hangman game with new features, like give-and-take lists and difficulty levels, while learning almost dictionaries, key-value pairs, and assignment to multiple variables.

Your next projection is a Tic-Tac-Toe game, which introduces some loftier-level artificial intelligence concepts, shows you how to brusque-excursion evaluation in conditionals, and explains the None value also every bit some different ways of accessing lists.

Your journeying through the rest of the book gain in a similar vein. You'll acquire nested loops while building a Mastermind-way number guessing game, Cartesian coordinates for a Sonar Hunt game, cryptography to write a Caesar cipher, and artificial intelligence when implementing Reversi (also known as Othello), in which the computer can play against itself.

After all of this, at that place's a dive into using graphics for your games with PyGame: you'll embrace how to animate the graphics, manage collision detection, as well as employ sounds, images, and sprites. To bring all these concepts together, the book guides you through making a graphical obstacle-dodging game.

This book is well done, and the fact that each project is a self-contained unit of measurement makes information technology appealing and attainable. If y'all're someone who likes to larn by doing, then you'll enjoy this book.

The fact that this book introduces concepts just as needed can be a possible disadvantage. While it'due south organized more as a guide than a reference, the broad range of contents taught in the context of familiar games makes this i of the best books for learning Python. (Reviewed by David Schlesinger.)

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Think Python: How to Remember Like a Computer Scientist, 2nd edition

Allen B. Downey (O'Reilly, 2015)

"Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" Book Cover

If learning Python by creating video games is too frivolous for yous, consider Allen Downey's book Think Python, which takes a much more serious arroyo.

Equally the championship says, the goal of this book is to teach you how coders think nearly coding, and it does a practiced task of it. Compared to the other books, information technology's drier and organized in a more linear way. The book focuses on everything you demand to know most basic Python programming, in a very straightforward, clear, and comprehensive way.

Compared to other similar books, information technology doesn't get quite as deep into some of the more avant-garde areas, instead covering a wider range of cloth, including topics the other books don't go anywhere near. Examples of such topics include operator overloading, polymorphism, assay of algorithms, and mutability versus immutability.

Previous versions were a little light on exercises, but the latest edition has largely corrected this shortcoming. The book contains four reasonably deep projects, presented every bit case studies, but overall, it has fewer directed application exercises compared to many other books.

If yous like a pace-by-step presentation of just the facts, and yous want to get a little additional insight into how professional coders look at problems, this book is a corking choice. (Reviewed by David Schlesinger and Steven C. Howell.)

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Effective Computation in Physics: Field Guide to Research with Python

Anthony Scopatz, Kathryn D. Huff (O'Reilly, 2015)

Effective Computation in Physics

This is the book I wish I had when I was first learning Python.

Despite its name, this book is an fantabulous choice for people who don't take feel with physics, research, or computational problems.

Information technology actually is a field guide for using Python. On top of really instruction you Python, information technology as well covers the related topics, similar the control-line and version control, also every bit the testing and deploying of software.

In add-on to beingness a bang-up learning resources, this book will also serve as an excellent Python reference, equally the topics are well organized with plenty of interspersed examples and exercises.

The book is divided into 4 aptly named sections: Getting Started, Getting information technology Washed, Getting it Right, and Getting it Out There.

The Getting Started section contains everything you need to hitting the ground running. It begins with a chapter on the fundamentals of the bash control-line. (Yes, you can even install bash for Windows.) The book so proceeds to explain the foundations of Python, hitting on all the expected topics: operators, strings, variables, containers, logic, and period control. Additionally, there is an entire chapter dedicated to all the different types of functions, and some other for classes and object-oriented programming.

Edifice on this foundation, the Getting it Done department moves into the more information-centric surface area of Python. Note that this section, which takes up approximately a 3rd of the book, will be most applicative to scientists, engineers, and data scientists. If that is you, enjoy. If not, feel free to skip ahead, picking out any pertinent sections. But be sure to catch the last chapter of the section because it will teach you how to deploy software using pip, conda, virtual machines, and Docker containers.

For those of you who are interested in working with information, the department begins with a quick overview of the essential libraries for data assay and visualization. You lot then have a separate chapter dedicated to instruction you the topics of regular expressions, NumPy, data storage (including performing out-of-core operations), specialized data structures (hash tables, data frames, D-trees, and k-d trees), and parallel computation.

The Getting it Right section teaches you how to avert and overcome many of the common pitfalls associated with working in Python. It begins past extending the give-and-take on deploying software by education yous how to build software pipelines using make. Yous then learn how to use Git and GitHub to runway, store, and organize your code edits over fourth dimension, a process known as version control. The section concludes by teaching you how to debug and exam your code, two incredibly valuable skills.

The concluding section, Getting it Out There, focuses on finer communicating with the consumers of your code, yourself included. It covers the topics of documentation, markup languages (primarily LaTeX), code collaboration, and software licenses. The section, and book, concludes with a long list of scientific Python projects organized by topic.

This book stands out because, in addition to teaching all the fundamentals of Python, information technology also teaches y'all many of the technologies used by Pythonistas. This is truly one of the best books for learning Python.

It also serves equally a great reference, volition a full glossary, bibliography, and index. The book definitely has a scientific Python spin, but don't worry if y'all do not come from a scientific background. There are no mathematical equations, and you may even impress your coworkers when they meet you lot are on reading up on Computational Physics! (Reviewed by Steven C Howell.)

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Larn Python iii the Hard Fashion

Zed A. Shaw (Addison-Wesley, 2016)

"Learn Python 3 The Hard Way" Book Cover

Learn Python the Difficult Mode is a classic. I'grand a big fan of the book'due south arroyo. When y'all learn "the hard way," y'all have to:

  1. Type in all the code yourself
  2. Practice all the exercises
  3. Find your own solutions to problems you meet

The great thing near this book is how well the content is presented. Each chapter is clearly presented. The code examples are all concise, well constructed, and to the point. The exercises are instructive, and any issues yous run into will not be at all insurmountable. Your biggest risk is typographical errors. Arrive through this book, and you'll definitely no longer be a beginner at Python.

Don't let the title put you off. The "hard way" turns out to exist the easy way if you take the long view. Nobody loves typing a lot of stuff in, simply that's what programming actually involves, so information technology's good to get used to it from the get-go. One nice matter nigh this book is that it has been refined through several editions now, so any rough edges have been made nice and smooth by at present.

The book is constructed equally a serial of over l exercises, each edifice on the previous, and each teaching y'all some new feature of the language. Starting from Practise 0, getting Python prepare upwards on your calculator, yous begin writing simple programs. You lot learn near variables, data types, functions, logic, loops, lists, debugging, dictionaries, object-oriented programming, inheritance, and packaging. You even create a unproblematic game using a game engine.

The adjacent sections cover concepts like automatic testing, lexical scanning on user input to parse sentences, and the lpthw.spider web package, to put your game upwards on the web.

Zed is an engaging, patient author who doesn't gloss over the details. If you piece of work through this volume the correct way—the "difficult way," past following up on the study suggestions provided throughout the text as well as the programming exercises—you'll be well beyond the beginner programmer stage when you've finished. (Reviewed past David Schlesinger.)

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Existent Python Form, Office 1

Real Python Team (Real Python, 2017)

Real Python Logo

This eBook is the first of three (and so far) in the Real Python form serial. It was written with the goal of getting you up and running, and it does a smashing job at achieving this goal. The volume is a mix of explanatory prose, example code, and review exercises. The interspersed review exercises solidify your learning by letting you immediately utilize what you've learned.

As with the previous books, clear instructions are provided up front for getting Python installed and running on your computer. Subsequently the setup section, rather than giving a dry overview of data types, Real Python simply starts with strings and is really quite thorough: you lot learn string slicing before you hit page thirty.

Then the book gives you a adept sense of the flavor of Python past showing you how to play with some of the form methods that can be applied. Next, you learn to write functions and loops, use provisional logic, piece of work with lists and dictionaries, and read and write files.

Then things get really fun! In one case you've learned to install packages with pip (and from source), Real Python covers interacting with and manipulating PDF files, using SQL from inside Python, scraping data from web pages, using numpy and matplotlib to do scientific computing, and finally, creating graphical user interfaces with EasyGUI and tkinter.

What I like best about Real Python is that, in addition to roofing the basics in a thorough and friendly manner, the book explores some more advanced uses of Python that none of the other books hit on, like web-scraping. In that location are also two boosted volumes, which get into more advanced Python development. (Reviewed by David Schlesinger.)

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Best Python Books for Kids

The following books are aimed at adults interested in educational activity kids to code, while mayhap learning it themselves along the way. Both of these books are recommended for kids as young equally ix or 10, but they are neat for older kids as well.

It's important to notation that these books are not meant to exist just handed to a kid, depending on their historic period. They would be ideal for a parent who wanted to learn Python alongside their child.

Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming

Jason R. Briggs (No Starch, 2013)

"Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming" Book Cover

"Playful" is right! This is a fun book for all ages, despite its title. It provides a clear, easy to follow, introduction to Python programming. It's profusely illustrated, the examples are straightforward and clearly presented, and it's a solid guide for someone who wants to get a good grounding in the nuts, plus a footling more.

The volume begins with an excellent, detailed guide to getting Python installed on your organisation, whether that's Windows, Bone 10, or Ubuntu Linux. It then proceeds to introduce the Python shell and how it can exist used equally a simple calculator. This serves to introduce some bones concepts similar variables and arithmetic operation.

Next, iterables are tackled, and the chapter works its mode progressively through strings, lists, tuples, and dictionaries.

In one case that's accomplished, the Python turtle library is used to begin working with turtle graphics, a pop framework for teaching children to lawmaking. From in that location, the book progresses through provisional statements, loops, functions, and modules.

Classes and objects are covered, followed by a truly first-class department on Python's built-in functions, then a section on a number of useful Python libraries and modules. Turtle graphics are revisited in greater detail, subsequently which the book introduces tkinter for creating user interfaces, better graphics, and even animations.

This concludes office 1 of the book, "Learning to Program," with the remainder focused on building two fun awarding projects. The first projection is to build a single-role player version of Pong, called Bounce! This integrates the programming concepts of functions, classes, and command menstruation, together with the tasks of creating an interface using tkinter, illustrating to the sheet, performing geometric calculations, and using event bindings to create interactivity.

In the second projection, yous build a side-scrolling video game, Mr. Stickman Races for the Exit. This game applies many of the aforementioned concepts and tasks as Bounce! but with more depth and increased complication. Along the way, you too become introduced to the open up source image manipulation program GIMP, used to create your game'south assets. The book gets an amazing amount of mileage out of these two games, and getting them working is both instructive and a lot of fun.

I really like this volume. Whether you are young, or merely young at heart, you will savor this volume if you are looking for a fun, approachable, introduction to Python and programming. (Reviewed past David Schlesinger and Steven C. Howell.)

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Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming

Bryson Payne (No Starch, 2015)

"Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming" Book Cover

This book is similar to Python for Kids simply intended more for an adult working with a child (or children) to learn to code, every bit the title suggests. One thing that sets this book apart from most introductory books is the use of colour and illustrations on nearly every page. The volume is well written and presents learning to code as a way to teach children problem-solving skills.

Equally is commonly the case, this book begins with a Python installation guide. Compared to Python for Kids, the guide in this book is more than cursory but completely adequate.

The first activeness is, over again, turtle graphics. A number of basic variations on drawing a rotated square are presented—without a lot of underlying explanation, initially—but to introduce the full general concepts, simply by the cease of the section, y'all'll have been provided with a pretty good understanding of the basics.

Next, calculations, variables, and mathematics in Python are explained. In one case strings have been covered, the book brings all of that dorsum into turtle graphics to enhance and explore the piece of work that was washed earlier. By this point, the code explanations are extremely clear, with explicit line-past-line details. You'd have a difficult fourth dimension misunderstanding any of the code presented.

Lists are explored adjacent, as is the eval() function. Loops are introduced so used to create increasingly circuitous graphics with the turtle. Provisional expressions come next, forth with Boolean logic and operators.

The random library is introduced with a guessing game and randomly placed spirals made with turtle graphics. You explore randomness farther by implementing rolling die and picking cards, which leads upward to you creating the games Yahtzee and State of war.

Functions, more advanced graphics, and user interaction are investigated next.

The volume then branches off to embrace using PyGame to create fifty-fifty more than avant-garde graphics and animations, and and so user interaction to create a very simple drawing program.

At this point, you have all the tools to create some real games. Development of both a total-featured version of Pong and a bubble-popping game are presented. Both provide plenty depth to pose some challenges and maintain involvement.

What I like best most this book is its big number of programming challenges, likewise as the excellent summaries at the end of each chapter reminding you what was covered. If y'all and your child are interested in programming, this volume should take both of you lot a good distance, and you'll accept a lot of fun. As the author, Dr. Bryson Payne, said in his contempo TEDx talk, "Step out of your comfort zone, and go literate in the language of applied science." (Reviewed by David Schlesinger and Steven C. Howell.)

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Best Intermediate and Avant-garde Python Books

Knowing Python is ane affair. Knowing what's Pythonic takes practice. Sometimes Python's low barrier to entry gives people the mistaken idea that the linguistic communication is less capable than other languages, that way does non matter, or that best practices are only a matter of preference. Have you ever seen Python code that looked similar C or Fortran?

Learning how to apply Python effectively requires some understanding of what Python is doing under the hood. Pythonic programming takes reward of how the Python language is implemented to maximize the efficiency of your lawmaking.

Fortunately, there are some first-class books, packed with expert guidance, aimed to assist you take what you lot've learned and level up your skills. Any of the books in this section volition give you a deeper agreement of Python programming concepts and teach yous how to write developer-style Python code. Note that these are past no means introductory books. They practice not include the basics of getting started. These books volition be helpful if you are already coding in Python and want to further hone your skills on your path to condign a serious Pythonista.

Python Tricks: A Buffet of Crawly Python Features

Dan Bader (dbader.org, 2017)

"Python Tricks" Book Cover

This book illustrates valuable lesser-known Python features and best practices, written to help you gain a deeper understanding of Python. Each of the 43 subsections presents a different concept, referred to as a Python Trick, with discussion and easy-to-digest code examples illustrating how you can take advantage of that concept.

The book's content is broken into the following sections:

  • Patterns for Cleaner Python
  • Effective Functions
  • Classes & OOP
  • Common Data Structures in Python
  • Looping & Iteration
  • Lexicon Tricks
  • Pythonic Productivity Techniques

Every bit information technology says on the encompass, the content is organized as "A Buffet," with each subsection being a cocky-contained topic, with a brief introduction, examples, word, and list of Key Takeaways. As such, you should feel gratuitous to jump around to whichever sections are the most appealing.

In improver to the book, I peculiarly enjoyed the 12 Bonus Videos that are bachelor when yous purchase this as an eBook. They have an average length of xi minutes, perfect for watching during lunch. Each video illustrates a different concept using clear and concise lawmaking examples that are simple to reproduce. While some of the videos covered familiar concepts, they still provided interesting insight without dragging on. (Reviewed by Steven C. Howell.)

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Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming

Luciano Ramalho (O'Reilly, 2014)

"Fluent Python" Book Cover

This book was written for experienced Python 2 programmers who want to go proficient in Python 3. Consequently, this volume is perfect for someone with a solid foundation in the basics of Python, 2 or three, who wants to take their skills to the next level. Additionally, this book besides works well as a reference for an experienced programmer from another language who wants to look up "How exercise I practice <ten> in Python?"

The volume is organized past topic so that each section can be read independently. While many of the topics covered in this book are constitute in introductory books, Fluent Python provides much more detail, illuminating many of the more nuanced and overlooked features of the Python language.

The chapters are broken into the post-obit six sections:

  1. Prologue: introduces Python's object-oriented nature and the special methods that keep Python libraries consistent
  2. Data Structures: covers sequences, mappings, sets, and the difference between str and bytes
  3. Functions as Objects: explains the consequences of functions being first-class objects in the Python linguistic communication
  4. Object-Oriented Idioms: includes references, mutability, instances, multiple inheritance, and operator overloading
  5. Control Flow: extends beyond the basic conditionals and covers the concept of generators, context managers, coroutines, yield from syntax, and concurrency using asyncio
  6. Metaprogramming: explores the lesser know aspects of classes, discussing dynamic attributes and properties, aspect descriptors, class decorators, and metaclasses

With code examples on almost every page, and numbered phone call-outs linking lines of lawmaking to helpful descriptions, this book is extremely outgoing. Additionally, the code examples are geared toward the interactive Python console, a practical arroyo to exploring and learning the concepts presented.

I discover myself turning to this volume when I take a Python question and want an explanation that is more thorough than the one I would likely become on Stack Overflow. I also bask reading this book when I have a scrap of down-time and simply want to learn something new. On more than one occasion, I take found that a concept I recently learned from this volume unexpectedly turned out to be the perfect solution to a problem I had to solve. (Reviewed by Steven C. Howell.)

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Effective Python: 59 Ways to Write Improve Python

Brett Slatkin (Addison-Wesley, 2015)

"Effective Python: 59 Ways to Write Better Python" Book Cover

This book is a collection of 59 independent manufactures that build on a bones understanding of Python to teach Pythonic best practices, lesser known functionality, and congenital-in tools. The topics range in complexity, kickoff with the simple concept of being aware of which Python version you're using, and catastrophe with the more complicated, and typically ignored, concept of identifying retentiveness leaks.

Each commodity is a combination of example code, give-and-take, and a list of things to recollect.

As each commodity is independent, this is a cracking book to leap around in, allowing you lot to focus on the topics that are most applicable or interesting. This too makes it perfect for reading one article at a time. With each article existence effectually two to 4 pages in length, you could make time to read one article per day, finishing the volume in ii to three months (depending on whether y'all read on weekends).

The articles are grouped into the post-obit 8 capacity:

  1. Pythonic Thinking: introduces the best ways to perform common tasks, while taking advantage of how Python is implemented
  2. Functions: clarifies nuanced differences of Python functions and outlines how to apply functions to clarify intention, promote reuse, and reduce bugs
  3. Classes and Inheritance: outlines the best practices when working with Python classes
  4. Metaclasses and Attributes: illuminates the somewhat mysterious topic of metaclasses, teaching you how to use them to create intuitive functionality
  5. Concurrency and Parallelism: explains how to know to write multi-threaded applications in Python
  6. Built-in Modules: introduces a few of Python's lesser-known congenital-in libraries to make your code more useful and reliable
  7. Collaboration: discusses proper documentation, packaging, dependency, and virtual environments
  8. Product: covers the topics of debugging, optimization, testing, and retentiveness direction

If you lot take a solid foundation in Python and want to fill in holes, deepen yous agreement, and learn some of the less obvious features of Python, this would be a great book for yous. (Reviewed by Steven C. Howell.)

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Python Cookbook

David Beazley & Brian K. Jones (O'Reilly, 3rd edition, 2013)

Python Cookbook, 3rd. Edition

What makes this book stand up out is its level of detail. Code cookbooks are typically designed as short and sweetness manuals to illustrate slick ways of doing everyday tasks. In this case, each recipe in Python Cookbook has an extended lawmaking solution as well as an writer's discussion of some detail elements of the solution.

Each recipe starts out with a clear problem statement, such as, "You want to write a decorator that adds an extra argument to the calling signature of the wrapped function." Information technology and then jumps into a solution that uses modernistic, idiomatic Python 3 code, patterns, and data structures, often spending four to five pages discussing the solution.

Based on its more involved and sophisticated examples, and the authors' ain recommendation in the preface, this is probably the nearly avant-garde Python book on our listing. Despite that, don't be scared away if yous consider yourself an intermediate Python developer. Who's judging, anyway? In that location'due south an quondam saying that goes something like this:

"The all-time way to get a better basketball game thespian is to lose to the best players you can find, rather than chirapsia the worst."

You may encounter some code blocks you don't fully understand—come up dorsum to them in a few months. Re-read those sections subsequently you lot've picked upwards a few additional concepts, and of a sudden, information technology will click. Virtually of the capacity outset out adequately straightforward, then gradually go more intense.

The latter one-half of the volume illustrates designs like decorator patterns, closures, accessor functions, and callback functions.

It's always prissy to read from a trustworthy source, and this book's authors certainly fit that bill. David Beazley is a frequent keynote speaker at events such every bit PyCon and as well the author of Python Essential Reference. Similarly, Brian One thousand. Jones is a CTO, the creator of a Python magazine, and founder of the Python User Grouping in Princeton (PUG-IP).

This particular edition is written and tested with Python 3.3. (Reviewed by Brad Solomon.)

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One of the awesome things about Python is information technology has a relatively low bulwark to entry, compared to many other languages. Despite this, learning Python is a never-catastrophe process. The language is relevant for such a wide variety of tasks, and evolves so much that at that place will ever be something new to discover and learn. While yous can pick up enough Python to do some fun things in a calendar week or two, people who've been using Python for 20 years volition tell y'all they're still learning new things they can exercise with this flexible and evolving language.

To ultimately be successful as a Python programmer, yous need to begin with a solid foundation, so gain a deeper understanding of how the language works, and how to best put it to use. To gain a solid foundation, you lot actually can't go wrong with any of the best books to learn Python. If you want to learn Python with a child, or perchance teach a group of kids, cheque out the listing of best Python books for kids. After yous've got your feet moisture, check out some of the all-time intermediate and avant-garde Python books to dig in deeper to less obvious concepts that volition better the efficiency of your code.

All of these books volition teach you what you need to know to legitimately phone call yourself a Python coder. The only ingredient missing is you lot.

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Source: https://realpython.com/best-python-books/

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