Here are 78 books that Get Programming fans have personally recommended if you like
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Some programmers learn through online articles, videos, and blog posts. Not me. I need a throughline—a consistent, expert distillation of the material to take me from where I am to where I want to be. I am not good at patching together information from disparate sources. I need a great book. I have a PhD in computer science education, and I want to know what helps people learn. More importantly, I want to know how we can use such discoveries to write more effective books. The books I appreciate most are those that demonstrate not only mastery of the subject matter but also mastery of teaching.
Learning how to program in Python and make a video game at the same time. Hmm – sounds like learning your native language while writing a novel. That could be messy. Could be – but not with this book. McManus knows video games. McManus knows how to teach. I love the idea of teaching a programming language through one extended context. If, like me, you’re fascinated by retro video games, get this book and let that fascination propel you through your beginning programming journey. Bonus feature: commitment to the bit; everything is in space!
Launch into coding with Mission: Python, a space-themed guide to building a complete computer game in Python. As you work through the book, you'll build exercises and mini-projects, like making a spacewalk simulator and creating an astronaut's safety checklist that will put your new Python skills to the test. Before you know it, you'll have a working, awesome game to stump your friends with (and some nifty coding skills, too!). You can follow this book using a Raspberry Pi or a Microsoft Windows PC, and the 3D graphics and sound effects you need are provided as a download.
Some programmers learn through online articles, videos, and blog posts. Not me. I need a throughline—a consistent, expert distillation of the material to take me from where I am to where I want to be. I am not good at patching together information from disparate sources. I need a great book. I have a PhD in computer science education, and I want to know what helps people learn. More importantly, I want to know how we can use such discoveries to write more effective books. The books I appreciate most are those that demonstrate not only mastery of the subject matter but also mastery of teaching.
Learning to program is hard. We need teachers who remember this, who are patient, who support the learning process, who not only know how to teach but also know how to learn from their teaching. Severance is all of these things. I like the breezy but precise writing, sections on debugging, glossaries and exercises in each chapter, and discussion of common learner errors. Bonus feature: regular expressions.
Python for Everybody is designed to introduce students to programming and software development through the lens of exploring data. You can think of the Python programming language as your tool to solve data problems that are beyond the capability of a spreadsheet.
Python is an easy to use and easy to learn programming language that is freely available on Macintosh, Windows, or Linux computers. So once you learn Python you can use it for the rest of your career without needing to purchase any software.
This book uses the Python 3 language. The earlier Python 2 version of this book…
Some programmers learn through online articles, videos, and blog posts. Not me. I need a throughline—a consistent, expert distillation of the material to take me from where I am to where I want to be. I am not good at patching together information from disparate sources. I need a great book. I have a PhD in computer science education, and I want to know what helps people learn. More importantly, I want to know how we can use such discoveries to write more effective books. The books I appreciate most are those that demonstrate not only mastery of the subject matter but also mastery of teaching.
I’m a kid at heart. (My favourite book genre is middle grade fiction.) Don’t be put off by a book with "kids" in the subtitle. And what an ebullient book this is! I unapologetically laugh at this book’s humour. I like the short chapters with measurable progress in each one; I like the easy GUI programming to get us started; I like the computational study of probability and randomness. I could quibble over the order that some topics are introduced, and some of the forward references… but, you know what? I won’t. This author duo gets it. Bonus feature: that sneaky way of introducing mutability in Chapter 2. Bonus feature #2: SkiFree.
Hello World! Third Edition is a fun, easy-to-use guide with copious illustrations and engaging examples. It takes the reader on a playful tour of basic programming concepts and then puts those concepts together to make fun and useful programs. It uses Python, a programming language that is one of the easiest to read, write, and understand. Like the previous two editions, Hello World! Third Edition is not just for kids. While the tone is light and engaging, it doesn't "talk down" to the reader, and beginners of any age will love its readability and sense of humor. Written by Warren…
Some programmers learn through online articles, videos, and blog posts. Not me. I need a throughline—a consistent, expert distillation of the material to take me from where I am to where I want to be. I am not good at patching together information from disparate sources. I need a great book. I have a PhD in computer science education, and I want to know what helps people learn. More importantly, I want to know how we can use such discoveries to write more effective books. The books I appreciate most are those that demonstrate not only mastery of the subject matter but also mastery of teaching.
I used this book for several years starting in 2013 when the first edition came out. It absolutely holds up today. Learning the Python language (the syntax) is one thing. Learning how to design programs using this syntax is another. We need both but, unfortunately, many books forgo the latter for the former. Not this book! I like the Problem Solving and Worked Example sections: they help learners apply a disciplined, step-by-step strategy to programming projects. There are multiple, varied contexts here as well, which helps capture a broader base of learners. Bonus feature: the Computing & Society boxes.
Python for Everyone, 3rd Edition is an introduction to programming designed to serve a wide range of student interests and abilities, focused on the essentials, and on effective learning. It is suitable for a first course in programming for computer scientists, engineers, and students in other disciplines. This text requires no prior programming experience and only a modest amount of high school algebra. Objects are used where appropriate in early chapters and students start designing and implementing their own classes in Chapter 9. New to this edition are examples and exercises that focus on various aspects of data science.
I’ve been teaching and writing Python code (and managing others while they write Python code) for over 20 years. After all that time Python is still my tool of choice, and many times Python is the key part of how I explore and think about problems. My experience as a teacher also has prompted me to dig in and look for the simplest way of understanding and explaining the elegant way that Python features fit together.
Al is one of the clearest writers on Python that I know. Here he distills his experience as both a working software engineer and a successful author to take coders from advanced beginner/intermediate level on to all of the “extra” knowledge one needs to write good code for practical use. When I read this book I find myself wishing I could write with such simplicity.
You're a student who wants to jumpstart their career with practical skills, or you're a self-taught beginner who has learned all you can from beginner programmer books and coding bootcamps. Now you're looking for the next step to becoming a real-world professional programmer so you can create your own apps and get started with your career. If that fits, then this book is for you! This book is perfect for self-taught programmers looking for the stuff intro books don't teach you and students wanting to get practical information before getting started with applying their new programming skills.
I’ve spent most of my life writing code—and too much of that life teaching new programmers how to write code like a professional. If it’s true that you only truly understand something after teaching it to someone else, then at this point I must really understand programming! Unfortunately, that understanding has not led to an endless stream of bug-free code, but it has led to some informed opinions on programming and books about programming.
This book’s title is absolutely perfect! There’s no agenda here other than identifying things that will make you a more effective and productive programmer.
That leads to a book packed with solid advice, whether it’s about how to write code or how to think about your career. The authors are consultants, so there are plenty of clear and interesting examples drawn from many different problem domains. That’s super fun for someone like me who’s hyper-focused on a single kind of programming.
"One of the most significant books in my life." -Obie Fernandez, Author, The Rails Way
"Twenty years ago, the first edition of The Pragmatic Programmer completely changed the trajectory of my career. This new edition could do the same for yours." -Mike Cohn, Author of Succeeding with Agile , Agile Estimating and Planning , and User Stories Applied
". . . filled with practical advice, both technical and professional, that will serve you and your projects well for years to come." -Andrea Goulet, CEO, Corgibytes, Founder, LegacyCode.Rocks
". . . lightning does strike twice, and this book is proof." -VM…
I’ve been teaching and writing Python code (and managing others while they write Python code) for over 20 years. After all that time Python is still my tool of choice, and many times Python is the key part of how I explore and think about problems. My experience as a teacher also has prompted me to dig in and look for the simplest way of understanding and explaining the elegant way that Python features fit together.
Dane covers the more advanced topics a programmer needs to be successful as a professional. In particular, he has good discussions of the basics of software design – things like separation of concerns, encapsulation, testing, and performance, as well as some of the issues involved with creating and maintaining large-scale systems. This is the book that I wish I’d had early in my coding career.
Summary Professional developers know the many benefits of writing application code that’s clean, well-organized, and easy to maintain. By learning and following established patterns and best practices, you can take your code and your career to a new level. With Practices of the Python Pro, you’ll learn to design professional-level, clean, easily maintainable software at scale using the incredibly popular programming language, Python. You’ll find easy-to-grok examples that use pseudocode and Python to introduce software development best practices, along with dozens of instantly useful techniques that will help you code like a pro.
My first computer was an early IBM PC back when all my friends had Commodores they used for gaming. Not being able to share their games meant I had to do something else, so I read the Introduction to Basic book that came in the box. I’ve been coding, reading about coding, writing about coding, teaching about coding, and talking about coding ever since. The world of technology moves so fast that it is hard to keep up. If you’ve taken one of my courses or listened to The Real Python Podcast, I hope you’ve heard about my passion for the topic.
When I work with students new to programming I often find they struggle with translating the toy problems in exercises to actually doing something in the real world.
I love this book and frequently recommend it to new programmers because it is centered around problems. Coding should be about making your life easier. At the beginning, the problems are small, but by the end, you’re learning about email, PDFs, and GUIs.
Sweigart has a great voice, and reading this feels like being guided by a friend rather than yet another coding textbook.
In this second edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, you'll learn the basics of programming in Python, the fastest growing programming language today, before moving on to create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation. This updated edition is full of step-by-step instructions that walk through each programme. Practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programmes and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks.
I’ve been dabbling in Python for the last 22 years. I am a regular speaker at Pycon India ever since its inception. Most of my talks are related to Django. I host arunrocks.com where I write tutorials, and articles and publish screencasts on several Django and Python topics. My initial screencast titled "Building a blog in 30 mins with Django" is one of the most popular screencasts for beginners in Django. I’m a developer member of the Django Software Foundation.
Building scalable and performant web applications is both an art and a science. This book focused on such techniques and hence goes beyond what most books on Django try to cover. Anyone running a Django site under heavy load will definitely learn a few tips from this book. However, it is light on explanations and expects you to figure out many things from reading the examples.
Since I was a kid, I’ve been passionate about technology and had a clear vocation to work with computers. I’ve been a developer for more than 20 years now, spending half of them mainly in the Python environment, and I’ve always been interested in improving my skills. While it’s true that software development is a field that changes constantly and technology evolves at great speed, there are some elements that remain relatively unchanged and can be used to compound knowledge and ability. In particular, the elements that are closer to the human element, teamwork, coordination, etc. are quite stable over time.
While this is a Python-specific book, it’s a fantastic description of all the possibilities for testing with a powerful module like Pytest offers. Testing is one of the basic experiences for a programmer, as it should be included as a core part of the development process. Understanding all the different options available like mark groups of tests, parametric tests, building your own extensions, or test coverage, to name only a few details, expands the understanding of how to design better tests and run them more efficiently.
Do less work when testing your Python code, but be just as expressive, just as elegant, and just as readable. The pytest testing framework helps you write tests quickly and keep them readable and maintainable - with no boilerplate code. Using a robust yet simple fixture model, it's just as easy to write small tests with pytest as it is to scale up to complex functional testing for applications, packages, and libraries. This book shows you how. For Python-based projects, pytest is the undeniable choice to test your code if you're looking for a full-featured, API-independent, flexible, and extensible testing…
