In this era where programming skills are highly profitable and beneficial, everyone’s making use of the myriads of resources on the internet to learn about programming. Not only can you develop programs for your personal use or just for the sake of building something, but you can also continually augment your skills, through tons of practice and the right connections, to win a spot at reputable companies such as Google, Tesla, Amazon, etc.

As Steve Jobs famously once said:

“I think everybody should learn how to program a computer (learn a computer language) because it teaches you how to think.” — Steve Jobs

That said, I myself am in the journey of developing my skills in programming, more specifically in Python, which is one of the most, if not the most popular programming language right now. This is why I’ve scoured the internet and assembled this menagerie or personal collection of resources I’ll be using to really master Python in its entirety. I’m not advising anyone to learn each and every resource from this list since one only has so much time, so do select a few of the ones that YOU want to use and ones that you believe can get the most out of.

Some of the books and online courses are free, some aren’t, so do make sure they’re good investments for your learning and development before deciding to pay for them. I hope this article will be a useful resource for anyone who’s looking to learn about Python.

Table of contents

1. Books
2. Online Courses
3. Youtube
4. Coding Challenges
5. Blogs & Websites
6. Podcasts
7. Newsletters
8. IDEs and environment

Books

Books are the driver of information and provide the impetus for a greater, more knowledgeable society. It’s always great to learn skills from books, as they are trustworthy and compact. I find books for programming and coding better to be an ebook so that it’s easier to reference and use. Here are a few I find great for learning Python.

Beginners

This constitutes the fundamentals of Python, from installing and setting up python to writing full-blown programs with classes and functions (OOP)

• Automate the boring stuff with Python (2nd Edition) — A free two-part book covering the basics along with projects for automating the monotonous tasks on your computer, helping beginners apply their knowledge straight away.
• Python Crash Course (2nd Edition) — PCC has more detailed explanations on the concepts and is a two-part book as well, the first part being the basics, from printing hello world to OOP, writing classes and functions from scratch, and the second is 3 fun little projects — creating a game, visualizing data and web applications.
• Think Python 2e — Think Python is a great free book to follow up to the previous two, mainly because it teaches you the basics of computer science, and uses Python to accomplish that goal.
• Learn Python 3 the Hard Way — This is another option for beginners in programming to dive into Python. It’s not difficult in the sense that you won’t understand anything, it’s more of a different approach to learning, which explained by the author as “instruction”, where you build skills through repetition.

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