Recommend Recent Python Books or Online Tutorials

[Marbelous]

Greetings,

I want to know if there are any recent Python books that cover python from beginning to end. There are so many resources online on how to learn Python but books are usually better because of the publishing rules.

I have a ton of resources to learn Python but confused at which ones I should learn; both online and books.

Thanks,
Matt

Whether you have previous coding experience or not, IMHO the best place to start with python is to simply read through the built-in tutorial written by Guido Van Rossum (creator of python) himself. If you downloaded python in the normal way there should be a doc called "The Python Tutorial" already installed. There will also be a language reference and full explanations of the standard library.

It only takes a day or two to read through the tutorial and when you're done you'll have a good grasp of where you want to go next. Trying to recommend a single book is difficult as people just have different tastes. I read through Learning Python by Mark Lutz and did learn a lot but honestly, I think any programmer's time is better spent in picking a small project and actually coding it than reading about concepts you never actually apply. The tutorial will give you all the python syntax you need. The rest is general algorithms and data structures which you can pick up a lot better as you write a real program rather than always looking for something similar to copy/modify like many noobs do.

I also recommend you browse through the Python Module of the Week site. It's a great way to get your feet wet and learn things you will use forever in the real world.