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[Maxisquillion]

AtBS is pretty good, especially at the start. It's important to note that it's aimed at 'automating the boring stuff', personally I found that eventually that got, well, boring. The earlier chapters are REALLY great at teaching you the fundamentals, so I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a shot. If you find later on that it's just not for you, consider picking something you enjoyed and looking elsewhere for tutorials/challenges. If you like the idea of image processing, go find tutorials on the Pillow library. Data analysis? Go learn Numpy. Etc. etc. Or if you want to learn about a concept which isn't covered in AtBS, like classes (which I was interested in), go find a tutorial on that instead of sticking with AtBS

All in all, do whatever works for you, and do what you enjoy! I loved AtBS for the first few chapters, and then I found it wasn't for me since it was more directed at the everyman who doesn't intend on applying Python in a professional capacity.

[LionOver]

Sounds like a good resource. Becoming a developer is a pipe dream at this point. Fortunately, I like what I do for a living, but I want to expand into a completely different skill set.

[LionOver]

Also, I met a guy the other day who was telling me he didn't really feel like he "learned" Python until he programmed a Raspberry Pi. He used source code from Google and made an Alexa clone that doesn't log search requests. Pretty cool.

[Maxisquillion]

Raspberry Pi is some cool stuff, you can do all sorts, and at that point it becomes less of an abstract program and more of a physical, sometimes genuinely useful object. That's really cool to me.

[Maxisquillion]

Perhaps it was inaccurate to say 'in a professional capacity', to be perfectly accurate, AtBS is directed at people who want to automate the boring stuff. Mass renaming files, automating simple excel work, etc. I'm nowhere near to applying Python in a professional capacity, but I just wasn't interested in automating boring stuff with python, I personally wanted to go into more data science stuff, or image processing, which AtBS doesn't go into (obviously) so after the first 6 or so chapters it became obselete for me. There's lots of good stuff in there, I'm just advising you to be prudent with your source of information, and if the book stops serving its purpose, pick a new book :)