Best Python Books in 2024

Are you seeking the best Python books to level up your programming skills, or looking for a beginner's handbook to learn Python? If your answer is yes, you are not alone.
Python is a popular programming language, and in order to stand out from the competition, one needs to have advanced knowledge and skills. To develop this set of skills, it is important to gain in-depth knowledge of Python; and reading Python books is one of the most effective ways of doing this. So, here is a list of the best Python books to begin your Python learning journey and level up your skills as a Python developer.

Table of Contents

- Best Python Books for Beginners

• Python Crash Course, 2nd Edition
• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition
• Learning Python, 5th Edition
• Head-First Python: A Brain-Friendly Guide

- Advanced Python books for professionals

• Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition
• Fluent Python – Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming

- Best Python books for machine learning

• Introduction to Machine Learning with Python – A Guide for Data Scientists
• Machine Learning with Python Cookbook

- Best Python books for Kids

• Python for Kids – A Playful Introduction to Programming

- Best Python books of all times

• Learn Python the Hard Way

- Conclusion

- FAQs

Best Python Books for Beginners

The programming industry is constantly evolving and with this evolution comes a demand for programmers. To meet this demand, the developer population across the globe has increased steadily. As per a survey, there were about 24.5 million developers worldwide in 2020 and by the end of 2024, there will be about 28.7 million of them. With such a large number of people ready to provide for programmers' demand in the industry, the competition is expected to grow drastically.

If you are completely new to Python and want to advance to a professional level, here are the best Python books to choose from.

Python Crash Course, 2nd Edition

One of the top Python books to begin your learning is the Python crash course, 2nd edition. This book is an international bestseller with over 1 million copies sold worldwide. Its likability among readers is much attributed to its on-point, fast-paced approach to offering updated guides on Python. The book can be divided into two parts. The first part offers the basic knowledge and teaches the fundamentals of Python. It offers an interactive approach to learning while leaving room for you to practically do what it is teaching you. It also offers three practical projects for different applications. These projects include:

• Building an online web application
• Using Python libraries to build a set of data visualizations
• Create an arcade game inspired by Space invaders.

The best thing about this book is that it requires no prior knowledge of programming. It also offers advanced learning guides in the form of its projects that has always drawn the interest of experienced programmers. The best part is it offers three projects that you can simultaneously work on while reading the book and label them as your portfolio projects to make your skills visible.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition

This one is another best-selling book that is liked by over 94% of Google users and has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 as per Goodreads. Unlike other Python books, it focuses on teaching the art of automating some boring and routine tasks with programming in a beginner-friendly way. It offers knowledge of everything from automating clicking tasks, scraping web data along, and working with Google Sheets and Gmail. It teaches a series of interesting things including finding text in various files without opening them, updating and renaming files and folders effortlessly. It is the book to advance your knowledge and learn to automate routine time-consuming tasks effectively.

Learning Python, 5th Edition

Learn Python, 5th Edition is a book by the famous author, Mark Lutz. This book is based on his training course and helps readers in learning to write high-quality Python code. The book is recommended for both beginners and professionals, but is majorly liked for its simplified explanations for beginners. It offers self-learning tutorials in the form of quizzes, illustrations, and exercises to practically implement one's learning. Other than that, it also enables readers to learn advanced Python features such as built-in data types like lists, numbers, and dictionaries. Secondly, it teaches the use of functions for avoiding code redundancy and package code for reuse. It also teaches how to write large programs through the exception-handling model and development tools of Python.

Head-First Python: A Brain-Friendly Guide

Head First Python is one of the best visual Python books, which is a part of the “Head-First” series. This book is comparatively shorter than other books on this list but still provides a quality learning experience in a concise format. It is majorly popular for its huge number of visual illustrations that help in learning complex topics such as object-oriented programming. This book covers everything from the basics of Python to working with objects and decorators. The best part about this book is that it keeps you entertained throughout the learning process. Other than that, it also offers a project that helps you build a web app using Flask, a micro-framework. Overall, this one is a highly valuable piece of work for beginners to indulge in playful learning.

Advanced Python books for professionals

Here is the list of top-rated Python books that are worth reading for advanced professionals.

Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition is an ideal book to learn how to write advanced Python code. It sheds light on advanced topics and teaches ways to become an advanced programmer. The book assumes that the reader has introductory Python knowledge. It focuses on offering insights to writing more readable and elegant code by covering a variety of topics including:

• Data structures and algorithms
• Files and I/O
• Network and web programming
• Generators and iterators

Overall, it is a very specific book that majorly focuses on practical learning to work with Python.

Fluent Python – Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming

Fluent Python is another advanced book that teaches programming capabilities. It is one of the best-selling Python books that help other language-experienced programmers to gain an in-depth understanding of Python. It also helps beginners to learn and understand advanced Python elements. It also focuses on teaching metaprogramming concepts, data structures, and data models. It also offers a better understanding of concurrency and generators. It guides you through what you have already learned at a beginner level and takes you to a higher level by effectively explaining the importance of improving code.

Best Python books for machine learning

Introduction to Machine Learning with Python – A Guide for Data Scientists

This one is an excellent piece of knowledge compiled for those who are skilled programmers and want to learn the concepts of machine learning with Python. Unlike most other Python books, this one teaches the skill of writing clean machine learning-oriented code. It sets up a strong foundation of machine learning concepts and teaches the science of becoming a skilled Scikit-Learn user. It majorly focuses on teaching how to create unsupervised machine learning modules. It also demonstrates how one can use Scikit-Learn, one of the popular machine-learning libraries. It is preferable due to its practical approach to learning. It not only focuses on how to write Scikit-Learn code, but also teaches why the code is written in a particular way.

Machine Learning with Python Cookbook

Machine Learning with Python Cookbook is a piece of practical guide for solving machine learning or AI challenges. It offers about two hundred recipes to troubleshoot routine challenges that head up with routine tasks. The book assumes that the reader has basic knowledge of Python and offers ML recipes that include code that can be adapted, inserted, or combined to create an application. Each recipe comes with explanations about the solutions and offers meaningful insight. It majorly focuses on the practical implementation of its teachings and offers the elements one would need to build a machine learning application. It offers recipes for everything including matrices, vectors, arrays, handling categorical and numerical data, visuals times, etc. It also offers model evaluation, selection, and dimensionality reduction feature selection and extraction.

Best Python books for Kids

Python for Kids – A Playful Introduction to Programming

Python for Kids is one of the best Python books for kids that teaches Python in a fun and engaging manner. It makes use of visuals and interesting texts that are ideal to match kids' level and help them learn better with fun examples of secret agents and monsters. It focuses on teaching foundational concepts of Python including conditional flow, data structures, functions, the art of drawing patterns, shapes, and UIs. It benefits kids by focusing on the subject of their interest such as building games and draws them into creating playful and interesting programs.

Best Python books of all times

For general reading, the following is one of the best Python books you can choose to read.

Learn Python the Hard Way

It is quite difficult to name the best book with all the masterpieces already discussed above. Still, we can rightly say that Learn Python the Hard Way is a go-to option for both beginner and advanced Python learners. It is a systematic book that helps you learn Python and offers a total of 52 well-drafted exercises. It offers exercises to type code precisely without any copy-pasting, and teaches you how to fix your mistakes on your own. It is ideal for beginners to learn to code and for experienced programmers who want to dive deep into programming concepts. The book is followed by 5 hours of video teaching in which the author teaches to fix, break, and debug complex code on your own.

Conclusion

When choosing the right book it is important to know the level of programming proficiency one has to understand it. No book is a bad book but when it comes to programming, it is important to know firsthand about the level of knowledge you need to learn from that book. So begin your learning journey with these beginner and advanced level books to master your learning process.

FAQs

1. Which books in what order should I read to learn Python?

To commence your learning from the beginner to advanced level you can begin with Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition which is ideal to build a base for advanced learning. Your next pick should be Fluent Python which offers in-depth knowledge of the language. To further advance your learning you can pick Introduction to Machine Learning with Python which is a great book to learn about AI with Python.

2. Which one is the best book to learn Python?

The best Python book to begin learning Python from scratch is Python Crash Course, 2nd Edition. However, for advanced learners, the best book, to begin with, is Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition.

3. Who invented Python?

Python was invented by the famous Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum in 1989.