[Tutor] Book recommendation

[John Wong]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 7:14 PM, D Wyatt <fiberfolly at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello.  I've been a member of this group for a very long time and have
> played with Python for years, but have never gotten past being a beginner
> for various reasons.  I just discovered a very good, free book, that is
> answering many of the questions I have had in the past that I never got
> answers I could understand from you all.  While I appreciate the time and
> effort you put in helping us out, most of you do not remember what you
> didn't used to know, and are often less than helpful because of this.  This
> is not meant as a criticism, but just my observation.
>
>
I think that's a constructive feedback. There are two problems. One is
often the question itself is not well-phrased. The other is remote
communication is a known challenge. I could spend a whole hour doing pair
programming or whiteboarding a solution with someone next to me physically,
but I can't do that over the Internet easily. The person asking the
question may not respond to my reply the next day (timezone difference).
It's a hard problem. I often ask my questions on IRC, and my experience is
also not quite as good as I would hope, although there are enough people to
chime in.

A lot of learning is practice, and then having a mentor available.


> Anyway, this book I found, Learning Python, is well-written and easy to
> understand.  Here is a url to it.    https://www.packtpub.com/tech/python.
>
>
Great. I am glad you found one that's helping you. I share the view that
any book is a good book as long as the book is giving correct information.

A few other ones:
* Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
* Learning Python by Mark Lutz - I started my journey with this, many years
ago
* Dive Into Python - quite good for beginnger
* Google's Python Class - very gentle introduction
* Python classes online (e.g. the ones available on MIT OCW) - pretty good
if you like slow, lecture-based.
* Python documentation
* Python Essential Reference (for intermediate -> advanced)
* Learn Python the Hard Way (not so much into this, just personal
preferences)

Just my 3.1415 cents.

John