Skip to main content

Best Python book for beginners

It's really surprisingly difficult for someone who has been programming for a long time to write about programming at a level appropriate for real beginners. The first time I taught a class full of beginners at Neumont, I tried to take things as slow as possible. Then I spent the next week covering the material from the first day even slower.
So when the UGIC asked me to recommend a book to get for the participants in the Introduction to Python, I looked at all the ones I could find, but they all either assumed too much existing knowledge or covered material that would just confuse a beginner. Often both. But then Michael Bernstein pointed me to Python for Dummies.
If you're looking to teach beginners, or you're a beginner yourself, Python for Dummies is by far the best option. There's a few sections that are strikingly inappropriate for a book at its level (new-style classes!?) but it's still much, much better than any of the other books on the market in this respect. As a bonus, it's also one of the few that covers Python 2.5.

Comments

Paul said…
I haven't read Python for Dummies, but wanted to suggest a favorite which converted me to Python: "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, Learning Python"

It's free at ibiblio.org, here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/

Like ESR, I had rejected Python a couple of times in the past because of what I saw as a radically different syntax (the whole indentation thing mainly) but after I read the foreward of this online book, I was hooked. After finishing the book, I was convinced. Python is a keeper--I gave up Java and Perl and haven't looked back (ymmv, and to each his own, and all that)

What's your take on HTTLACS as compared to Python for Dummies?
9:12 PM
Jonathan Ellis said…
HTTLACS may be the best option that is freely available. However, as the title says, it does try to approach the subject with some rigor. Recursion is covered early and in some detail, for instance, and I know from experience that this tends to blow beginners' minds.

It also never really covers anything really Python-specific. This is fine for its purpose, but for practical use you'd want something that (eventually) covers things like list comprehensions, generators, etc.
10:44 PM
Anonymous said…
I second your recommendation of "Python for Dummies" as a good intro book. It is right up at the top of my books for Python beginners at Amazon.
4:23 AM
CecilSunkure said…
I haven't read that particular book either, but I have started with this book that is free online, and is targeted more towards creating games in Python with the Pygame engine. Here it is: http://inventwithpython.com/chapters/

I recently started up with this book, and am posting up my experiences with it in my own blog here: http://cecilsunkure.blogspot.com/

I actually highly recommend this book, it's tiered in such a way that seems perfect. The example code and projects in the book are also exceptionally useful for working on yourself. Since the example code is documented so extremely well, I am able to gain a pretty good understanding of every aspect of the code presented in the book. A must read for anyone interested into coding games.
10:08 AM
Casey said…
You can easily learn Python by reading the official tutorial and then working through the Python Koans.

http://pythonprojectwatch.blogspot.com/2011/06/master-python-and-tdd-through-python.html
11:53 PM
Anonymous said…
My personal favourite Python book is

The Quick Python Book

It's great for beginners
11:37 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...
30 comments
Read more

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...
Post a Comment
Read more