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Free Python Books

inventwithpython.com

123 pointsAlSweigart19 comments

There is a brilliant new book (albeit somewhat advanced) that I don't see in this list: Introduction to Python for Econometrics, Statistics and Data Analysis (2014) by Kevin Sheppard. PDF available for free here: https://www.kevinsheppard.com/images/0/09/Python_introductio...

I'll add it to the page. Thanks!

As an economics major, thanks!

Wouldn't a curated list be much better? We can all type "python programming" on amazon and get a pretty similar list of books. It is not interesting. What is interesting is to know which book to read.

Agreed. So many times I've wished there was either a high-quality, curated list (by pro Python programmers for new-to-intermediate Python programmers) or a place where such books are reviewed by pros.

Does anything like that exist?

Mm. He's adding books to the list he hasn't read, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8714541

Whoring for amazon affiliate money would be fine if he were making recommendations based on knowledge and experience, but this is just plain whoring for change regardless of its impact on readers.

A bad programming book can set you back by wasting your time. These books might not be bad, but how would he know, without reading them?

99% of the knowledge on that list can be found on http://greenteapress.com/

and the pygame stuff here http://thepythongamebook.com/en:pygame:start

no affiliate links on either.

Aspiring programmer here. So, I've completed the following from that page and on the web: - Google's Python course (https://developers.google.com/edu/python/) - Learn Python the Hard Way (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book) - ThinK Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf)

Also working on the O'Reilly Python book.

Three books later, I still don't really feel like an "expert" with Python. I mean, I know the syntax well enough, I know basic programming idioms, I just need something of intermediate complexity to work on, somewhere between "Learn Python From Scratch!" and the Python Standard Library. Coming from a C background, I don't need to be told what most of these concepts are, I just need to know how Python does them.

I also made the mistake of trying to learn several languages (e.g. Java, Javascript, and Python) simultaneously, and by poor choice or poor availability of free materials, nearly all of them ended up being along the lines of these "Learn X Language with no programming background!" The end result being if I have to hear someone tell me again what an "if" statement and a "for loop" are, my head is going to explode.

To reiterate, where does one look for an Intermediate level Python book?

Could you go a little bit more into detail what exactly you are looking for? As in, what don't you know right now that you expect to learn from the book?

What do you want to do with Python?

My personal experience is that "learn language X" is more difficult and less productive than "learn to do Y with language X."

Figure out what you want to accomplish with the language and worry about the rest along the way.

Try to solve a real world problem using python. I'll give you more details/answers once I'm at my home.

This is a collection of real world python projects written in 500 lines or less. https://github.com/aosabook/500lines The goal was to be a resource for intermediate python developers to be able to look at real world applications. Hope this helps.

That's a great idea. I've recently started browsing through some of the top-voted questions and answers at http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ to see how coding / scripting can be improved.

Edit: After browsing through the list of projects, I found three which were both interesting / useful to me and (just about) within my abilities:

* Guido van Rossum’s web-site crawler

* Ned Batchelder’s template engine

* Malini Das’ simple Continuous Integration system

Great resource. Does anyone know about other collections of small projects (python, javascript, ...) similar to this one?

This is great. I notice a ton of these came out within the last year. I wonder if the advent of so many colleges switching to Python for CS 101 is driving a surge of new titles.

Thanks for this! Would be nice to use multiple filters (such as "Free" and "Web Apps")

Thanks for sharing. Adding sorting in an ascending/descending manner would be useful as well.

Spent about 15 minutes on that site and found five, free books that I could use. Thank you.

It would be cool to have a filter for PDF downloadable books

What a huge list! There are many new titles coming in 2015.

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