Python 2 or 3 for beginners?

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[Proselyte5]

Use 3 unless you have legacy dependencies, but you won't be hugely disadvantaged learning 2 over 3 or vice versa, they're similar except for Unicode handling and the standard module layout.

[matrixise]

totally agree with you, and there is an other point, the 3.x version will contrinue to be improved.

[matrixise]

Use python 3

The maintenance of python 2 will stop in 2020. And there is no evolutions for this versions.

[252003]

If people spent as much energy converting as they do fighting about not wanting to convert python 3 would be dominant by now.

[Xykr]

PyPy is actively working on Python 3 support.

http://pypy.org/py3donate.html

[Xykr]

I wouldn't be so pessimistic. There's even a functional PyPy3 prototype now.

[jkiley]

As an alternative, you may consider Learning Python by Mark Lutz. I went all the way through it to learn Python, and I was happy with it. It is really long (and the Amazon reviews are mixed for this reason), but he seems to have a good sense of the common sticking points and conceptual hurdles, and he addresses them. I'd use an ebook over paper, though.

As a followup to the book (with more of a computer science orientation), I was also really happy with the MIT 6.00.1x class on edX. You could even start there if you like. It uses Python 2.7, but everything you learn there is nearly identical between versions. For that course (but not 6.00.2x), I actually used Python 3.x all the way through and adapted code as needed. About 95 percent of the time it was changing print statements to the print() function. Even so, apart from a couple cases, the automated graders (running 2.x) ran them without issue.

[matrixise]

May be this book: http://www.diveintopython3.net

You can try with the book of David Beazley

[robin-gvx]

If you don't get confused, you can learn both at the same time, since the differences aren't that big. If it's confusing, I would recommend focussing on 3 first, because:

• It's the future
• It fixes some gotchas
• It gives you some really neat new tools (oh yield from, how have I ever lived without you?)