Top Python books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Python books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Python

Understanding the concepts of Python starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Python 3: The Comprehensive Guide

Ready to master Python? Learn to write effective code with this award-winning comprehensive guide, whether you’re a beginner or a professional programmer. Review core Python concepts, including functions, modularization, and object orientation and walk through the available data types. Then dive into more advanced topics, such as using Django and working with GUIs. With plenty of code examples…

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Football Analytics with Python & R

Our book will help you understand some of the basic skills used daily by football analysts. For fans, this will likely be enough data science skills. For the aspiring football analyst, we hope that our book serves as a springboard for your dreams and lifelong learning. To help you learn, this book uses public data.

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Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

If you've ever spent hours renaming files or updating spreadsheet cells, you know how tedious tasks like these can be. But what if you could have your computer do them for you? Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition teaches even the technically uninclined how to write programs that do in minutes what would take hours to do by hand—no prior coding experience required!
This new, f…

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Intuitive Python: Productive Development for Projects That Last

In this book, you will learn about some of Python's greatest strengths, weaknesses, and tools to maximize the utility and resiliency of your Python projects. This book contains content for programmers—especially programmers newer to Python—interested in leveling up the projects they maintain with Python.

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Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People

Grokking Algorithms is a friendly take on this core computer science topic. In it, you'll learn how to apply common algorithms to the practical programming problems you face every day. You'll start with tasks like sorting and searching.

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Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn: Develop Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models with Python

Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn is a comprehensive guide to machine learning and deep learning with PyTorch. It acts as both a step-by-step tutorial and a reference you'll keep coming back to as you build your machine learning systems.

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Additional Python Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Python, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code

Zed Shaw has perfected the world’s best system for learning Python 3. Follow it and you will succeed—just like the millions of beginners Zed has taught to date! You bring the discipline, commitment, and persistence; the author supplies everything else. In Learn Python 3 the Hard Way, you’ll learn Python by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. …

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python teaches you how to program in the Python language. Each chapter gives you the complete source code for a new game, and then teaches the programming concepts from the examples. Games include Guess the Number, Hangman, Tic Tac Toe, and Reversi.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Head First Python

Head First Python, you'll quickly grasp Python's fundamentals, working with the built-in data structures and functions. Then you'll move on to building your very own webapp, exploring database management, exception handling, and data wrangling.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Python Distilled

Python Distilled has a perfectly suited title: This book is for experienced programmers who want to learn Python and need the Python programming language's core syntax, standard library, and Pythonic idioms.

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The Big Book of Small Python Projects: 81 Easy Practice Programs

This collection of 81 Python projects will have you making digital art, games, animations, counting pro- grams, and more right away. Once you see how the code works, you'll practice re-creating the programs and experiment by adding your own custom touches.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and Tensorflow

The hands-on Machine Learning book is an amazing piece by Aurélien Géron, taking you from the basics of Machine Learning to applying them to real-word scenarios all in one book.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Specializations and Deeper Python Knowledge

You've got your basics in order – time to move on to some advanced and specialized concepts. Python is evolving every day, these books can help you master it.

Python Cookbook: Recipes for Mastering Python 3

This book is aimed at more experienced Python programmers who are looking to deepen their understanding of the language and modern programming idioms. Much of the material focuses on some of the more advanced techniques used by libraries, frameworks, and applications.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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