Review: Python Crash Course

Recently I have been having an itch to do a deep dive into Python, and with one of my Humble Bundle purchases I have decided to spend some time diving into this book.

The Python Crash Course book is essentially a bootcamp put into a book. This is a very lengthy book, it isn’t something you can do overnight but is something that can take weeks and weeks because there is a lot to cover. It goes from not knowing code to building your own websites in Python. This is for the beginners who are trying to dive into something new.

I would say this book can have essentially a big learning curve for the beginning, getting set up can be kind of a headache. I didn’t use the terminal for python cause I use PyCharm and Visual Studio Code for the compiler and builder. And this might be a little out of date, I believe the one they tell you install is Python version 2.7 and the current version as I am writing this review is 3.9. Now 2.7 ends of life is around the corner BUT this book isn’t totally out of date. The concepts and lessons and exercises are still great. Don’t skip on the exercises especially since they help build that practice up

The things I found great about this book are the examples and how they keep it simple to teaching. It doesn’t get to technical into the history of an int or char, it is more focused on giving you examples of why you build a function one way, then as you gain more knowledge you will go back, redo some exercises in other ways that keeps showing that your coding will evolve. The practice exercises are very closely related to the book exercises it takes you through step by step. So it doesn’t throw a curb ball at you by having you do something that involves googling the answers.

The downside to this book is you might not want to buy it digitally; I buy all my books digitally and what I learned very quickly is that Python is a very precise language. When your writing code in many other coding languages tabs and spaces are not required, but in Python spaces and tabs matter, when your coding and spacing everything correctly matters. Why did having a digital book cause so many issues? It became kind of tough to tell how many times I needed to tab over for my functions and for loops as I got to the more advanced lessons. This means I did a lot of bug fixing when it came to my code due to something not being spaced or tabbed correctly.

If you are learning how to code or want to take a crash course in programing this is a good starting point for learning how to proceed into python. It isn’t overly wordy and it doesn’t drone on about anything else but what is going on in the current lesson and how it relates to the coding world.  This book however should probably be bought physically so you can take notes, see the text clearly and hopefully it’s color coded in the physical cause it’s hard digitally and that makes it a little tough.