Best Novice Book

[JosephInc]

I am completely new to programming and will be taking programming classes for my major after I take my General Ed classes starting in the fall. I want to know at least one language before taking these classes and I have heard that Python is a good language to be a "first programming language".

Are there any good, for beginners new to computer programming and Python, books that teach you the Python programming language? Any you'd recommend?

Thanks in advance.

[suicideducky]

I myself am reading learning python, but I do have some, although minimal, programming experience (informal visual basic 6.0 and toying in visual C++ 6.0).

But I have heard good thigns of a bye of python
http://www.swaroopch.com/byteofpython/
It is aimed towards a beginner audience, here is an excerpt from that link:

Introduction

‘A Byte of Python’ is a book on programming using the Python language. It serves as a tutorial or guide to the Python language for a beginner audience. If all you know about computers is how to save text files, then this is the book for you.

The book has crossed nearly 50,000 downloads in the past few years.

You are right about python being an excellent beginner language to, but it is much more than that, I hope you enjoy your python journey, the community is here if you need it every step of the way.

Welcome, and I hope you enjoy your stay.
Goodluck,
Ducky

[JosephInc]

Thanks. I am downloading Byte of Python.

I do have a question - Is it possible to code a application (not for the web, but desktop, like a word processor, IDE, etc...) in Python and it install on your computer like MS Word does and Firefox does, etc...? So you do not have to click on a file and the command promt pop up and then the program coded in Python pop up. I hope this makes sense.


P.S: Which book would you recommend for absolute beginners like me? (A Book I can purchase, I want a hardcopy of one).

[Zyzle]

Sure you can, take a look at py2exe, if you haven't guessed from the name, it creates .exe files using your python code so that programs will run like standard windows executables, There are other tools out there which do the same thing, but iirc py2exe is the only one currently under active development. There are also tools which do similar things under Linux and Mac OS.

As for the books I would(and often do) recommend "Core Python Programming" by Wesley Chung. Its a great book that goes through virtually everything you could want to know about python programming.

Hope this helps.

[JosephInc]

I will check out py2exe.

Is that book targeted for beginners in programming and Python?

[KDoiron]

If you have Python installed on your PC, you can store the program files (program.py, for example) on your desktop and associate the 'py' extension with Python, in the same way that 'doc' and 'xls' are associated with Word and Excel. When you click on the icon, the program will run, using Python. The only reason you might want to look at py2exe is so that you can give the executable code to someone who doesn't have Python on their PC. In my office, for example, I have Python on my PC for development. When I'm ready to distribute a program, I compile the program to an exe using py2exe, and store that exe file on a network drive. I then put a shortcut to that exe on the users' desktops. There's no way my company would allow development tools on users' computers.

As for Wesley Chan's book, I'm not too familiar with it. I learned using "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz and David Ascher. It was a good introduction to Python programming, but one criticism I heard from others is that it does assume that you have some understanding of programming, not necessarily of a specific language, but of programming in general.

There's also a 'free books' thread on this board - I think it's under 'general'. And if you look around the beginner's section, there are other discussions about the merits of different books too. I think I saw one with a title something like "How To Think Like A Programmer". That might be useful too, although it might only be online.