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Best Resources for Mastering Python

A Comprehensive List of Resources for Learning Python

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Python is a high-level interpreted Programming language that can be used for a variety of software development tasks including scientific computing, machine learning, data analysis, image analysis and much more. In this post, I will walk through some of the best learning resources for mastering python.

Let’s get started!

Online Learning

Corey Schafer YouTube Channel

One of the first learning resources I started using for learning Python was Corey Schafer’s YouTube Channel. Corey’s channel is great if you are just getting started or if you’re a seasoned python developer that is interested in trying something new with python. The channel has playlists for the following topics:

  1. Python Programmer Beginner Tutorials

This is pretty self explanatory. This playlist contains comprehensive videos for learning the python basics in an accessible manner. Here you’ll learn about types, lists, tuples, dictionaries, conditionals, loops and iteration, functions, the OS module, the python standard library and much more. This is truly a great place to start for those who feel intimidated by Python as it is very accessible for any audience.

  1. Pandas Tutorials

Pandas is a powerful python library for data analysis and data manipulation. Corey’s channel provides a playlist of tutorial videos discussing how to perform various tasks on data. These include reading and writing data, filtering data, selecting data, adding/removing rows, aggregating data and much more!

  1. Django Tutorial

Corey’s channel also contains tutorials on the Django, a python based web framework. If you already have some python development experience in your back pocket and you’re interested in learning how to build highly scalable and secure web applications, I highly recommend you check out Corey’s Django tutorials.

Sentdex YouTube Channel

Sentdex is a YouTube channel run by Harrison Kinsley that provides in-depth machine learning tutorials in python. Sentdex was instrumental in my early learning days as a data scientist and I highly recommend the channel to anyone with an interest in delving into the field. The channel covers many fundamental machine learning algorithms such as linear regression, neural networks, random forests, support vector machines and much more.

DataCamp

DataCamp is a subscription-based platform that provides high quality video tutorials on python and machine learning. The Data Science with Python Track is particularly great for those who want to get their feet wet using python for machine learning. It is also a great place to sharpen data science and machine learning fundamentals as well as explore some applications to niche industry verticals.

Books

If you learn more efficiently through books, the following texts are great resources for learning python:

  1. Learning Python, Mark Lutz & David Ascher

Learning Python by Mark Lutz is a great place to get started learning python. It covers many of the fundamental concepts such as types & operators, lists, dictionaries, tuples, conditionals, functions, modules, classes and much more.

  1. The Python Cookbook, Brian Beazley & Brian K. Jones

If you have some python experience, The Python Cookbook is a great resource to take your skills to the next level. As the name suggests, this book serves as a catalogue of recipes for performing a wide variety of development tasks in an efficient way. This book discusses data structures & algorithms, string & text manipulation using regular expressions, HTML & XML parsing, handling dates & times, working with generators and iterators, network and web programming and much more!

  1. Effective Python, Brett Slatkin

This is another intermediate text that is great for deepening your python knowledge. It covers how to write pythonic code, that is how to code in a simple and explicit way while maximizing readability. Within the framework of pythonic thinking, it covers some fundamental concepts including functions, classes, metaclassess, concurrency, built-in modules and more. This way of developing in python helps you write clean easy to read code which makes working with the language much more of a pleasure.

  1. Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & TensorFlow, Aurelien Geron

Once you have a solid foundation in python, if you’re interested in getting your feet wet with machine learning, I recommend Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & TensorFlow. This text covers machine learning fundamentals including how to build classification models & regression models, reduce dimensionality, build deep neural networks, build convolutional neural networks, build recurrent neural networks and much more. If you are a python programmer with an interest in getting started with machine learning, this is a great resource.

CONCLUSION

In this post, we discussed several resources for mastering the python programming language. For those truly just getting started, I highly recommend Corey Schafer’s channel & Learning Python by Mark Lutz. These resources will sufficiently familiarize you with the language and open the doors for other possible interests you may have. Whether you want to build the next Instagram with Django or the next facial recognition Technology using deep learning in Keras, this list is enough to get you started on your Python journey. I hope you found this post useful/interesting. Thank you for reading and good luck!


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