Books and Talks

Top choices for inspiration

• Allen Downey Think Python and the Green Tea Press series.
• Raymond Hettinger and Beyond PEP8 talk (2015).
• Kris Jenkins talks to developpers about their work in Developper Voices podcast.

Leading books

• Allen Downey Think Python (now in 3rd edition).
• Al Sweigart and "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python".
• Eric Matthes and "Python Crash Course" (also 3rd edition).

These are modern and more accessible books that seems to be more popular than ealier and more lengthy volumes by Zed Shaw, Mark Pilgrim, Mark Lutz and Kenneth Reitz.

Also notable:

• A Whirlwind Tour of Python by Jake VanderPlas.

Full course

Take a University of Helsinki Python MOOC 2025 while it is still free and open.

py4e is a well-structured beginner course originated in 2015.

Short references

QuantEcon and Scipy Lectures make a quick introduction to Python before jumping to bigger topics in quantitative and scientific modelling. They can serve as practical introductions to Python.

Add kaggle link to Zohrab's notebooks.

Style guides

Two big ones:

• PEP 8 – Style Guide for Python Code
• Google Python Style Guide

Small old gems:

• Best of the Best Practices (BOBP)
• Dmitry Mugtasimov's notes

Renowned speakers

• Raymond Hettinger. Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python and Beyond PEP-8 as mentioned above.
• James Powell. So You Want to Be a Python Expert?
• David Beazley. Discovering Python.

Programming classics

"The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie (1978) is a classic in technical writing and a foundational piece of computer literature.

From "The Mythical Man-Month" (MMM) by Fred Brooks (1975), a classic in software engineering and project management, we know that there is no silver bullet, adding more people to a late software project makes it worse, and other laws and adages that still hold true today.

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP) by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman (1985) is an influential text that can convince skeptics that programming is a science but also at risks deterring you from programming for life.

TIP

Read on the MMM, glance through the SICP table of contents, and get a table copy of K&R.

Blogs

1. programming is terrible blog posts could have really made a good book together. Around the same time Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky released their blog series as books. Still prefer tef's writing and hope he is doing well despite of a pessimistic blog title.

   • Write code that’s easy to delete, and easy to debug too.
   • Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything.
   • Write code that’s easy to delete, and easy to debug too.
   • How I write software.

2. "Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them" and 119 other perilisms by Alan Perlis.

   Not to confuse with great other books - the Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley or Book fo Why by Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie.

3. Write unmaintainable code - enure a job for life by Roedy Green.

Glossaries

• Devil's Dictionary of Programming (2013).
• IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary (1990).

Talks

Software is hard:

• The Future of Programming Bret Victor.
• The Art of Code by Dylan Beattie.
• Why Can't We Make Simple Software? by Peter van Hardenberg.

Social is hard:

• Julie Pagano. It's Dangerous to Go Alone: Battling the Invisible Monsters in Tech - mental health, inclusivity and making tech a better place.

Tired of it?

Sometimes it worth switching your attention to other knowledge areas and questions away from programming. Several suggestions:

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky (1994).
• The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams by Randy Pausch (2007).
• Philosophy of Science interview with Rafaela Medeiros, where I'm the interview host (2021).