Python is a great language to start learning programming. It helps you get started quickly and produce easy to understand code. As one of the most popular programming languages with Java and the C family, it also has a lot of helpful ressources on the web and a great collection of third-party libraries to do even more in Python. This article is a collection of ressources that I found interesting as a beginner but also a few that helped me with more advanced topics like properly packaging your project to distribute it to others.
Books
First of make sure that the examples in the books are using Python 3. It was released in 2008 and except in special cases (when you need a library that is only available for Python 2) should be used to start learning Python.
For beginners:
- Think Python
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python!
- Dive Into Python
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Web applications
I personally only had to create smaller web application. For this reason I choose the lightweight Flask. If you want look at at the very popular Django or one of the many other alternatives like Bottle andPyramid.
- Full Stack Python
- Explore Flask: Best practices and patterns for developing with Flask.
- The Flask Mega-Tutorial
Packaging
If you think other might want to run your Python project and it’s bigger than a single file and/or it depends on many third-party libraries, then you might be time to take a look at how you can distribute your package on the Python Package Index which make installing your package as easy as just running your command
pip install <yourpackage>
to install it on a new computer with all its dependencies. How to proberly package your package can be quite difficult. That’s why yould look at the following ressources first to find out how best to strucutre your project files and tests, provide documentation and configure the setup script for example.
Other
This is a collection of links that are left over because they didn’t fit into any other category.