Book Review: Head First Python by Paul Berry

I have never had any official training in Python and I am sure there are many other developers out there like me who came from a different language and easily picked up Python on their own. A very intuitive way of learning a new language is by using them to solve real world problems one at a time. Whenever I saw a challenge I could tackle at work, I used Python and in the process, learnt a bit more each time.

While this approach has many pros, the main con is that you miss out on the fundamentals. You might eventually learn them later but these fundamentals are the foundations of everything so it’s best to learn them in the beginning. This is why I picked up a beginner’s book called Head First Python by Paul Berry. While I was familiar with the Head First series, this is the first time I actually read one of its books. And I must say, I loved the approach that the book takes to teaching someone a new language. There are a lot of visuals so you don’t feel like you are just reading plain text. Additionally, there is a lot of repetition of core concepts so you don’t forget them easily.

The first few chapters of the book are dedicated to core python topics such as data structures, functions and modules, loops etc. The book’s author, Paul Berry, follows an example of creating a webapp through out the book as a real world problem that you are trying to solve. While I don’t think everyone is trying to learn Python to create a webapp, it was a good simple-enough example to use for the purpose of this book. The book also covers topics such as using Flask to quickly create a webapp and inserting data into a database.
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Once the basics are out of the way, Paul dives into more advanced topics such as context managers, classes, decorators, exception handling, threading and comprehensions. These are the topics I really wanted to learn more about. I found the chapter about creating your own context manager very interesting and helpful. In the book, Paul shows how you can create your own context manager to easily insert data into a database. Additionally, I have never used decorators earlier but had always heard about them. It was nice to get a quick introduction to them via this book so that now I can read more about them in-depth elsewhere.

Overall, I think Head First Python is a great book and definitely makes it easier to learn a new language. The book tries to stick to core Python features only and doesn’t dive into third-party apps (except for Flask) such as pandas, numpy etc. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn Python as long as you know another language already.

You can find the book on Amazon!

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