Free Python Books

by AlSweigart • 12 years ago

123 19 12 years ago

bluekeybox• 12 years ago

There is a brilliant new book (albeit somewhat advanced) that I don't see in this list: Introduction to Python for Econometrics, Statistics and Data Analysis (2014) by Kevin Sheppard. PDF available for free here: https://www.kevinsheppard.com/images/0/09/Python_introductio...

AlSweigart• 12 years ago

I'll add it to the page. Thanks!

grandconj• 12 years ago

As an economics major, thanks!

wodenokoto• 12 years ago

Wouldn't a curated list be much better? We can all type "python programming" on amazon and get a pretty similar list of books. It is not interesting. What is interesting is to know which book to read.

wyclif• 12 years ago

Agreed. So many times I've wished there was either a high-quality, curated list (by pro Python programmers for new-to-intermediate Python programmers) or a place where such books are reviewed by pros.

Does anything like that exist?

PostOnce• 12 years ago

Mm. He's adding books to the list he hasn't read, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8714541

Whoring for amazon affiliate money would be fine if he were making recommendations based on knowledge and experience, but this is just plain whoring for change regardless of its impact on readers.

A bad programming book can set you back by wasting your time. These books might not be bad, but how would he know, without reading them?

99% of the knowledge on that list can be found on http://greenteapress.com/

and the pygame stuff here http://thepythongamebook.com/en:pygame:start

no affiliate links on either.

jdnier• 12 years ago

What a huge list! There are many new titles coming in 2015.

publicfig• 12 years ago

Thanks for this! Would be nice to use multiple filters (such as "Free" and "Web Apps")

Alex3917• 12 years ago

This is great. I notice a ton of these came out within the last year. I wonder if the advent of so many colleges switching to Python for CS 101 is driving a surge of new titles.

finid• 12 years ago

Spent about 15 minutes on that site and found five, free books that I could use. Thank you.

cranklin• 12 years ago

It would be cool to have a filter for PDF downloadable books

AdmiralAsshat• 12 years ago

Aspiring programmer here. So, I've completed the following from that page and on the web: - Google's Python course (https://developers.google.com/edu/python/) - Learn Python the Hard Way (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book) - ThinK Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf)

Also working on the O'Reilly Python book.

Three books later, I still don't really feel like an "expert" with Python. I mean, I know the syntax well enough, I know basic programming idioms, I just need something of intermediate complexity to work on, somewhere between "Learn Python From Scratch!" and the Python Standard Library. Coming from a C background, I don't need to be told what most of these concepts are, I just need to know how Python does them.

I also made the mistake of trying to learn several languages (e.g. Java, Javascript, and Python) simultaneously, and by poor choice or poor availability of free materials, nearly all of them ended up being along the lines of these "Learn X Language with no programming background!" The end result being if I have to hear someone tell me again what an "if" statement and a "for loop" are, my head is going to explode.

To reiterate, where does one look for an Intermediate level Python book?

detaro• 12 years ago

Could you go a little bit more into detail what exactly you are looking for? As in, what don't you know right now that you expect to learn from the book?

commandar• 12 years ago

What do you want to do with Python?

My personal experience is that "learn language X" is more difficult and less productive than "learn to do Y with language X."

Figure out what you want to accomplish with the language and worry about the rest along the way.

mknits• 12 years ago

Try to solve a real world problem using python. I'll give you more details/answers once I'm at my home.

nikhilalmeida• 12 years ago

This is a collection of real world python projects written in 500 lines or less. https://github.com/aosabook/500lines The goal was to be a resource for intermediate python developers to be able to look at real world applications. Hope this helps.

Anthony-G• 12 years ago

That's a great idea. I've recently started browsing through some of the top-voted questions and answers at http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ to see how coding / scripting can be improved.

Edit: After browsing through the list of projects, I found three which were both interesting / useful to me and (just about) within my abilities:

* Guido van Rossum’s web-site crawler

* Ned Batchelder’s template engine

* Malini Das’ simple Continuous Integration system

vdhus• 12 years ago

Great resource. Does anyone know about other collections of small projects (python, javascript, ...) similar to this one?

jorgeborges• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing. Adding sorting in an ascending/descending manner would be useful as well.

Free Python Books

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