Recommend beginning python book/course?

Anvil Q&A
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My daughter is off to start her MSc in Physics & Astrophysics, and apparently they will be doing some python programming as part of the course.

Whilst I can obviously google this, can anyone personally recommend a good python course or ebook for non-programmers? She can’t do video courses (L1 ASD). She has done some python in school for GCSE but that was a while back and she’s forgotten most of it.

I am, of course, introducing her to Anvil :slight_smile:

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The Python Discord community curates a list of resources they recommend:

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That community is worth joining too. Their system for asking questions and getting help is very good.

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My lads both enjoyed Project Euler when they were learning.

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Python Data Science Handbook: Essential Tools for Working with Data by Jake VanderPlas really helped me when learning to use python for physics based analysis. I like it because it starts with the why behind using different techniques.

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Python Basics , by Dan Bader , also owner of the very nice realpython.com

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Thanks, but they seem to be all videos unless I’m missing something?

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Hi David,

The O’reilly Learning Python 5th ed is pretty decent.

James

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I have recommended https://www.codecademy.com/ to people in the past, it’s how I got “re-started”. (after doing CS, but then nothing for 10 years)

There are no videos*, its all hands on with some quizzes, you write python code in a box and they built a little python interpreter in ruby that runs the code. After each concept there’s like a 5 question quiz to let you know if you understand the concept, so you can rewind and start over at any point.

*(there are some optional videos, but they all have text with annotated pictures as the base, and the videos are the alternative to reading, not the other way around)

1 Like