The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally

VERY well written, excellent style. If you are a complete beginner it may advance too rapidly; it actually starts out quite basic, and if you are intermediate level and have been playing with Python for a while (as I) you can just breeze over the elementary stuff. I found the chapter(s) on OOP (classes etc.) particularly useful. I have been doing mostly functional and procedural type short programs and haven't paid much attention to OOP. But I am trying to get a handle on it now, (as I must if I'm gonna get anywhere with GA). The concepts were explained with code examples very clearly and in few pages! The section on BaSH is mostly review-over for me as I have been using Linux for a while now, but if you are also new to Linux (and you should get into it and dump MS ... don't get me started ...) it provides a very good intro to the command line and basic Linux usage, as well as "regular expressions" which are very good to know and apparently trip a lot of people up learning. You can even download the code snippets if you are too lazy to type them in (using the tinyurl web site). I am now working on the web scraper and plan to elaborate it for my own use (hint: don't you hate it when cool web sites won't 'let' you download the videos and full size pics ...). Recommend highly!

It's a great book for any new python programmer, especially those that learn in the self-taught way. It has a lot of examples and explanations that allow a reader to build the mental model of the language through experimentation. It is one of few books that adequately covered things in the way that you tend to model things when you -are- learning on your own. There's normally a strong possibility for gaps in knowledge when teaching yourself due to the way you can make assumptions without testing what the results would be, and this book doesn't necessarily cover ALL of them, but it does a good job with the numerous code samples of providing you fairly complete mental models of what's going on when you do various tasks in Python. I love that it takes that approach. I do wish that it covered some more of what is considered idiomatic in Python, but, that's very much a minor gripe on an excellent text for a certain kind of mindset and way of learning. Even with that being said there are a few chapters near the end that cover some best practices and ideas, but, not as deeply as I typically think about them. All in all a good resource that will help guide someone that's learning on their own on how to understand the language and achieve basic competence.

Good book. Moves a little fast at the beginning hosing you with vocabulary and concepts but there’s probably only so much that can be done with that. The book hasn’t been updated recently however, which is more problematic in my mind. There are minor differences in the examples given and what the most recent version of Python will do. So far nothing major but given how rapidly the coding world evolves, it surprised me that the author is letting it slowly fall into obsolescence. EDIT: The more I move through the book, the more irritated I get by the occasional sloppy formatting, because you have to spend time deciphering if certain punctuation is part of the code example or added simply for grammatical purposes. Difficult to explain here but IYKYK. Also, I'm finding that the author sometimes seems to cheat on practice exercises. He'll give a prompt for you to accomplish some task (presumably answerable from the information provided in the chapter). You'll work for ages on a solution, and in giving up and looking for how he solved it, he'll use some end-run solution using other means. For example, in Chapter 6, he'll say "take the list ["the", "fox", "jumped", "over", "the", "fence", "."] and turn it into a grammatically correct string with spaces between all the words but no space between the word 'fox' and the period." Great, alright...[work for 20 minutes]. Go to the solution, and the dude prints all the words up through "fence", and just drops the period, and then tacks it back on at the end. That's not turning the list into a sentence like the prompt said, it's just chopping parts out of it and then re-adding elements back in to technically get the same result. Very aggravating. Here is his solution to the exercise above (from Ch. 6-it's Python). The sleight of hand happens at line 3: 1. fox = ["The", "fox", "jumped", "over", "the", "fence", "."] 2. fox = " ".join(fox) 3. fox = fox[0: -2] + "." 4. print(fox) He does that kind of thing more than occasionally. Now it could be that I'm being unreasonable in what I'm expecting. Maybe there is a more direct way to do that, and it's just too early on to have learned that. Maybe he's trying to encourage creative problem solving. But I don't want to learn how to code with duct tape that *technically* functions but is trash code, I want to learn how to code. [/rant/

I'm in tech recruiting for experienced software engineers - we need to know our stuff if we don't want to get laughed away. I thought this was a great way to understand what I need to know in a very straight-forward way, and I was not wrong. This book really changed the way I recruit and has really influenced my perspective of professional programming in a way that makes conversations more interesting and effective. In fact, it's even encouraged me to try some of it and I've made a github account with some very basic practicing. I liked what I learned so much that I actually reached out to the author and asked if he would donate a few of these to the Django Girl's workshop I co-organize in Seattle, Washington, and he said yes! It's a workshop that aims to increase the presence of women in the tech industry and so this book is super relevant to the mission. To be clear, I would've given this book a five star rating anyway, but the graciousness of the author gives it an extra verbal star to boot. Thanks for helping all us gals out!

I'm not big into writing reviews but I had to write this for someone that once felt like me. I thought I was dumb, I couldn't grasp the concept of Python or any other language. I've tried codecademy, and online courses all ending in failure. I saw Corey on a talk show and immediately added his book to my Amazon cart. From the moment it arrived I was hooked. Each chapter starts with an inspirational quote that motivates you to keep going forward. I wanted to learn python so that I could get a job in the QA industry. After reading just a few chapters, I've decided that I want to be a software engineer. The entire book reads like a story and when things are explained it not only makes you ask questions, but they are answered in the next section. For the first time in my life I am actually writing in Python. I'm only on chapter three and I've already learned so much. For the people that haven't had much luck learning, this book is definitely for you. You are not alone. Everyone can learn from this book.

The beginning of the book was really nice with practice problems and such, but as it started to pick up, i could tell the chapters were possibly rushed. At that point i longed for more practice like on the command line but the book did provide that extra practice i desperately needed. The author is very generous on the links and resources. It made me a little upset that on the hangman game there was a line of code never taught in the previous chapters that somehow I was expected to know but never discovered it until i looked at the answer 2 hours of struggling later. I wanted to love this book but i put it down for a while when i got to the Bash chapter. I was inspired in the beginning only to say that i was disappointed in the end. To whoever reading this, best of luck to you on your programming journey.

A lot of people claim this book, "Isn't what they thought it would be," but for me it's what I exactly thought it would be. You see, I've been coding for most of my life trying to find something that would work for me. So, when I say I like Cory Althoff's book The Self-Taught Programmer, I truly mean it. To me, space is everything so I will put this as best I can: you can learn Python programming very simply from him with this simple, small book. He gives you the tools that helped him be the Python programmer he is. I think that says it all.

After learning FORTRAN and procedural programming decades ago, I was at a lost when trying to retool with OOP languages such as Python. I read a couple of books that went over code and concepts. But I felt like something was missing. I could write simplistic programs but didn't think I was utilizing the full benefit of Python. Althoff's book helped fill in the gaps. He gave the most lucid explanation of OOP concepts that I've come across, as well as touching on practical subjects such as the command line, bash, regex, and GitHub. As a result I feel more empowered to write meaningful code. There's also a lot of good advice in the book about how to code. Other books will contain more information about syntax and GUIs. Read one of them, then buy Althoff's book. It's really a must-read if you're trying to learn Python on your own.

This is a good guide book for python programming. It's easy to read. So reading this book might be your first step for becoming a professional programmer. However, the title is more attractive than the contents. :P

Kötü

Normally I don't give 1-Star, but this book here is totally nonsense in regards of its title. What is covered here are the basics for python and the absolute basics for bash control (like seriouly absolute basics and nothing more). You kind of expect an in depth explanation of design patterns used in the industry, standards to strive for etc. but nothing of this is in this book but only a bunch of tutorials you can easily find on the internet and for sure this book is not worth, what it costs. In regards I will send it back because I don't want to support this kind of "Book-Clickbaiting". Sincerely, not a hater.

Tres bonne approche a la programmation. J'ai achete ce livre pour mon ado (15 ans) qui s'interesse au sujet. Le bouquin est facile a suivre pour un passionne. Ca ne regorge pas d'algorithmes, de theorie et de maths - c'est direct dans l'action via un max d'essais pratiques. Mon ado a installe Python par lui-meme apres avoir commence ce livre et me pose des questions sur les exercices. Mission accomplie!

Good