Python Crash Course is really two books in one. The first half of the book teaches the basics of programming in Python, and the second half includes three in-depth projects. I wrote the book for anyone old enough to not want a kid-focused book. I’ve heard from readers as young as 10 and people in their 80s and 90s, and everyone in between.

The first half of the book aims to give people a solid introduction to programming, as efficiently as possible. Concepts are explained clearly and in simple terms, without dumbing anything down. I included all the topics that people need to know in order to start working on interesting projects, such as how to store information in a variety of ways and how to organize code into cleanly-structured blocks. I also included topics I wished I had leanred much earlier in my career, such as handling errors and testing your code.

The second half of the book walks readers through three projects – a video game, a series of data visualizations, and a web app that gets deplooyed to a live server. The video game is a Space Invaders clone, and the projectt is structured in a way that you can adapt it to just about any 2D game you might want to build. The data visualizations start with computer-generated data and then expand to focus on data that you can download. Readers leran to analyze and visualize weather data, and generate a map showing global earthquake activity. The last visualization focuses on accessing data through an API.

In the final project readers build a web app called Learning Log, an online learning journal. You learn how to store users’ information in a database, manage user accounts, add an appealing visual style, and deploy your project to a live server. When you’re finished you’ll have a meaningful app that anyone in the world can use.

Python Crash Course is the best-selling Python book in the world, and for good reason. It’s helped hundreds of thousands of people go from knowing nothing about programming at all to building the projects they’ve been wanting to build. It’s helped people experienced in other languages pick up Python quickly and efficiently. It’s helped many people start on a career they weren’t sure was available to them. It’s helped students with unavailable teachers and dry textbooks get up to speed quickly, and it’s helped mid-career people expand their capabilites.

You can buy Python Crash Course directly from No Starch Press, in which case you’ll get an ebook with the print copy. You can also buy it from Barnes and Noble or Amazon. If you’re working through the book, there’s also an extensive set of online resources.