Learn python from scratch Beginning Python Review

Beginning Python: From Novice To Professional was one of the first Python books I read. I chose this book because with it you could learn Python from scratch. The book starts from the installation of the language, going through the different types of data structures that Python includes and even two chapters on abstraction. When you get to the end of the introduction, the following chapters of this book touch on a different topic about Python each, some of the topics covered are as follows:

• Network and server programming
• Database manipulation
• Web pages
• HTML and XML handling
• Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)
• Extension of Python code with C, C++ or Java
• Program packaging

And, to close the book, the author offers us 10 different projects to put into practice all the topics mentioned above. As you can see, it is a complete walk through several areas of language.

Learning from scratch

The aspect I enjoyed most about this book was the wide variety of topics it touches on, it moves quickly from the basic programming language tutorial to more complex topics such as generating executables, compensating for the bottlenecks that Python has using C++, the part of tests in Python (which is ignored in most programming tutorials), you even learn the existence of quite popular libraries such as swig, tornado, beautiful soup, among others.

What’s wrong with Beginning Python

My biggest complaint about this book has the author’s neglect as the culprit. The book was written for Python 2, so most of the book’s content will need some fixes to keep it running for a short time, and will render much of its code obsolete when support for Python 2 comes to an end. Edit: There is already an updated version for Python 3. Although the range of topics covered in the book is quite wide, it is a bit lacking in depth, devoting about ten pages to deep topics such as graphical interfaces or code testing, which I would have liked it to expand a bit more, even at the expense of other topics or projects.

My opinion

I consider it an excellent book to learn Python from scratch. It’s challenging to find a tutorial that covers such a wide range of topics and so different from each other. However, I do emphasize that the version that should be purchased is the third edition, as it is the one that has the content updated to Python 3, the previous editions of the book are totally obsolete and are not recommended, much less in view of the depreciation of Python 2.

Recommended prior knowledge: HTMLRecommended to read: 8/10

If you prefer a book in Spanish and also free visit my entry where I review Inmersión en Python .