Free Tutorials to Learn Python: PDFs, eBooks, Online | Hacker News Reader

Free Tutorials to Learn Python: PDFs, eBooks, Online

noeticforce.com

I will never understand this obsession with unofficial documentation when the official documentation provides a perfectly adequate tutorial: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

If the official tutorial or manual is lacking, the normal procedure should be to improve it, not to write your own entire document.

Or, in today’s parlance: Submit a pull request before you fork the project or write a complete replacement for it.

I think the issue that many beginners have with official documentation is somewhere along of the line of - 'okay, this is great but what can I actually do with this?', which is outside the scope of official documentation.

These courses/books provide examples that may benefit people who are looking to get into Python/programming to solve a specific problem or to build something they've envisioned.

In theory, what you say could be true. In practice, however, this is not what I find when I happen to read these tutorials/beginner’s guides.

This seems like trolling, but this line of thought seems very extreme. Not sure where the perceived obsession comes from. People communicate in different ways and assuming that there should be a single refined dump of information is not taking into the account the fact that the people reading the documentation come from completely different backgrounds and technical levels of understanding.

"Submit a pull request before.." The unofficial documentation and related tutorials are exactly that, unofficial, they are not meant a replacements by any stretch of the imagination for the official documentation. Rather, these forks exist to speak to many different audiences and in some cases, speaking from personal experience, attempting to document and teach others is a very useful tool for personal edification regardless if it is a distraction from the "blessed" documentation.

Great resources. Another one worth adding might be the recently published https://github.com/yasoob/intermediatePython which got quite a bit of positive feedback, both, here and on the python subreddit.

I see lots of intro-to-Python tutorials. Is there a recommended "best practices" guide - e.g. virtualenvs, project organization and directory structures, advanced debugging, packaging and deployment?

http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/ apparently covers all of the above.

Thank you for sharing. This is awesome.

Nice list! Thanks for compiling!

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