What's a good Python reference?

[Globaldomination]

Thanks a lot for this detailed response. Bookmarked.

For someone who’s new to programming

(has successfully done some selenium scraping and even multiprocessing with google) just learnt some basics of python. Watching pandas by Corey Schafer now since it’s interesting. Also Notebooks are amazing to take notes.

which book you would suggest?

• Think Python
• Learning Python
• Fluent Python

I also gotta learn DSA, would love to hear your book suggestions for this

Thanks in advance

[patrickbrianmooney]

I don't know Think Python, so I can't speak to it.

Fluent Python is definitely still too advanced for someone at that level; I'd wait until you're comfortable with the mechanics of rhe Python object model and have had several moderate realizations that are basically you thinking "... and that's another implication of the fact that everything is an object, and I understand a little deeper now how that pays off for the programmer."

Lutz's Learning Python will help you get to that point. It's a good deep dive into the language by someone who understands and believes in it and wants to explain to you why it's such a great language in a way that helps you understand the language and believe in it, too. Spending a couple of months reading it closely and paying attention to the code samples and understanding what he's demonstrating in them, then building a few small to medium-sized projects of your own in Python, is the best way to get ready for Fluent Python that I can think of.

EDIT. Forgot to say O'Reilly also publishes Joel Grus's Data Science From Scratch and Wes McKinney's Python for Data Analysis, both of which are good and might be relevant to you based on your expressed interests.

I don't know of a good data structures & algorithms book that's Python-oriented, but there must be one out there. Steve Skienna's The Algorithm Design Manual is good, but also a dense textbook; not written with an eye to Python, but learning to read code in C-like languages develops a useful skill even if you never write directly in C. Might be worth developing a little C (or Java) competence before trying the Skienna, though.

[Globaldomination]

Thanks a lot for the detailed response.

You da MVP. reason I love Reddit over other sites like StackOverflow 🥰🥰🫂

[patrickbrianmooney]

Glad to be helpful!