What resources would you recommend for someone new to programming that wants to learn Python?
Exercism occasionally attracts people new that do not know how to program but want to learn Python. See, for instance this topic or this topic.
It would be good to have a collection of recommendations for people in that category which is Python specific. Let’s hear what you got!
We have a list of resources tagged on the website for beginners, although many of them might still be tough for someone totally new to programming.
In particular, I have heard from learners that Python for Everybody is a nicely paced class, and has rich support, with videos, exercises, and (several?) books. I have also heard good things about Python for Non-Programmers. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is a classic, but the free versions of the book and videos are getting a bit dated now.
Perhaps Real Python’s Intro to Python, but it may not be suitable for someone with no programming experience at all.
As a tag-on to the others mentioned above, Harvard’s CS-50 is often tagged as being a great group of courses, with a lot of support and interaction. It’s been a few years since I focused in on them, so some things may have changed, but there are multiple classes under the umbrella, and they were (for a while) offering live Q&A’s, podcasts, meetups, videos and other activities around them.
For beginners, I like the ‘Zero to hero’ course from TechWorld with Nana. She has a good and beginnerfriendly way of explaining things:
Learn Python in 5 Hours [FULL COURSE]
There is also an interesting and funny Python course from Socratica, which is definitely worth watching:
Learn Python with Socratica
For native speakers of German, like me, there is a very beginnerfriendly course in Python from the channel ‘Programmieren starten’
Python Tutorial deutsch [1/24] - Dein erstes Programm:
I did the CS50x course a while back and I think it was a really good introduction to computer science. On the way you get an understanding of C, Python, HTML, SQL, git and some web-framework. Back then I already had the impression that it is well-rounded, but during COVID they really boosted their digital learning experience to another level.
About 8 years ago, this was the book I used to learn Python: Learning Python by Mark Lutz | Goodreads
I really liked it. The book took its time exploring the concepts, which was perfect for me, since Python was the first time I was taking a scripting language more seriously and a lot of concepts were new to me.
Another thing I liked was the ability of the book to make me “think in python”, by showing different twists on things and including little challenges. Part of this was due to the book consistently mixing concepts when they made sense, instead of being a more linear (and less interesting imo) “concept after concept” book.
Not sure how it aged though. Since I read it, a lot of more useful features were introduced to Python and I haven’t kept up with new editions.
I love the concept of learning by doing and I think Exercism has done a great job of implementing that model not just for python but for a lot of other languages as well. The resources mentioned above are also great, one book I enjoyed(though didn’t get to finish) is TinyPythonProjects, it encourages you to try out solutions in your own way and guides you through it before checking the result, it also gives additional freestyle tasks that don’t have solutions in the book for you to solidify what you learned.