Python/New/Learn

[Avi Gross]

I agree Chris that the Ukrainian Python Books are daunting as I barely started learning that language now even though my early years were just a few miles away and I might even have relatives still there!

But as has been pointed out, suggestions are more helpful if you know a bit more about the one asking the questions or it is too broad. I do not feel qualified to suggest a book to true beginners as I leaned Python many decades after learning so many other computer languages and read a wide variety of books including many that assumed you already knew C or R or other languages, as I did. 

Someone new to programming may fin some resources including a tutorial handy. Someone who actually wants to use various modules like scikit-learn or pandas, or to solve specific problems, might well want to go straight to other resources or realize they need multiple resources over time.

It can be a diversion to get someone to learn the functional programming aspects or even object-oriented if the goal is to do simple procedural things. Python is an extremely rich language and I recall reading a three-volume encyclopedia that took months as the books got pulled away by other readers. So, no Mark Lutz got a bit advanced.

Oddly, I am learning Julia now and cannot find a single book in my group of Libraries, not even for the beginner I am not! But finding online resources was easy and if I have any reason to, plenty of books can be bought. It does not work for everybody, but my personal method is to attack issues and problems from multiple directions as each tends to reinforce and add to my knowledge. And I really appreciate when they tell you specifically how the language is different from others you may know so you know when not to expect it to work. A Julia documentation as an example, has a long list of places it is not like Python, or R or C++ and so on. If the person has computer language experience, some such resource might be better than something spending a thousand pages to teach from scratch.

But, I am not volunteering to do personal tutoring. I prefer responding to specific focused questions especially after the person seems to have done some searching and research and reading on their own and maybe even shares some code and asks what may be wrong with it or ...
And my first question would be why they chose to ask about Python. Was it their choice or required for a course or job or ...
Sometimes the answer is to use something else they already know, albeit Python is a very decent language for many uses and well-worth learning even if you know others.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>
To: Avi Gross <avigross at verizon.net>
Cc: python-list at python.org <python-list at python.org>
Sent: Wed, May 4, 2022 11:21 pm
Subject: Re: Python/New/Learn

On Thu, 5 May 2022 at 13:14, Avi Gross <avigross at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Chris,
>
> It was an extremely open-ended question to a forum where
> most of the readers are more advanced, at least I think.
>
>
> My library has oodles of Python Books for free to borrow on paper and
> return and I have read many of them. There are various e-books too, and
> of course lots of free internet resources including videos and on-line courses.
>
>
> If he wants simpler books, the web pages pointed here too:
>
>
> https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks
>
>
> Next time, I won't try to be helpful and brief and just be silent.
>

Being helpful is great, it's just that being brief can leave it as an
incredibly scary-looking list :) If you want to recommend a couple of
specific books, I think that would be a lot more helpful.

ChrisA