Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, 4th edition

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, 4th edition

 

The Best Python Books

Python is an amazing programming language. It can be applied to almost any programming task, allows for rapid development and debugging, and brings the support of what is arguably the most welcoming user community.

Getting started with Python is like learning any new skill: it’s important to find a resource you connect with to guide your learning. Luckily, there’s no shortage of excellent books that can help you learn both the basic concepts of programming and the specifics of programming in Python. With the abundance of resources, it can be difficult to identify which book would be best for your situation.

In this article, we highlight the best books for learning Python through a collection of book reviews. Each review gives you a taste of the book, the topics covered, and the context used to illustrate those topics. Different books will resonate with different people, depending on the style and presentation of the books, the readers’ backgrounds, as well as other factors.

If you are new to Python, any of the introductory books will give you a solid foundation in the basics.

Perhaps you want to learn Python with your kid, or maybe teach Python to a group of kids.

After reading these reviews, if you still are not sure which book to choose, publishers often provide a sample chapter or section to give you an example of what the book offers. Reading a sample of the book should give you the most representative picture of the author’s pace, style, and expectations.

Regardless of which book most stands out, consider this anecdote from one of our book reviewers, Steven C. Howell:

“A favorite professor once told me, ‘It doesn’t matter which book you read first. It’s always the second one that makes the most sense.’

I can’t say this has always been the case for me, but I’ve definitely found that a second reference can make all the difference when the first left me puzzled or frustrated.

When learning Python classes, I had difficulty relating to the examples used in the first two books I picked up. It wasn’t until the third book I referred to that the concepts started to click.

The important lesson is that if you get stuck or frustrated, and the resources you have are not helping, then don’t give up. Look at another book, search the web, ask on a forum, or just take a break.”

Best Books for Learning Python

If you are new to Python, you are likely in one of the following two situations:

1. You are new to programming and want to start by learning Python.
2. You have a reasonable amount of programming experience in another language and now want to learn Python.

This section focuses on the first of these two scenarios, with reviews of the books we consider to be the best Python programming books for readers who are new to both programming and Python. Accordingly, these books require no previous programming experience. They start from the absolute basics and teach both general programming concepts as well as how they apply to Python.

nvent Your Own Computer Games with Python, 4th edition

Al Sweigart (No Starch, 2017)

If games are your thing, or you even have a game idea of your own, this would be the perfect book to learn Python. In this book, you learn the fundamentals of programming and Python with the application exercises focused on building classic games.

Starting with an introduction to the Python shell and the REPL loop, followed by a basic “Hello, World!” script, you dive right into making a basic number-guessing game, covering random numbers, flow control, type conversion, and Boolean data. After that, a small joke-telling script is written to illustrate the use of print statements, escape characters, and basic string operations.

The next project is a text-based cave exploration game, Dragon’s Realm, which introduces you to flowcharts and functions, guides you through how to define your own arguments and parameters, and explains Boolean operators, global and local scope, and the sleep() function.

After a brief detour into how to debug your Python code, you next implement the game of Hangman, using ASCII artwork, while learning about lists, the in operator, methods, elif statements, the random module, and a handful of string methods.

You then extend the Hangman game with new features, like word lists and difficulty levels, while learning about dictionaries, key-value pairs, and assignment to multiple variables.

Your next project is a Tic-Tac-Toe game, which introduces some high-level artificial intelligence concepts, shows you how to short-circuit evaluation in conditionals, and explains the None value as well as some different ways of accessing lists.

Your journey through the rest of the book proceeds in a similar vein. You’ll learn nested loops while building a Mastermind-style number guessing game, Cartesian coordinates for a Sonar Hunt game, cryptography to write a Caesar cipher, and artificial intelligence when implementing Reversi (also known as Othello), in which the computer can play against itself.

After all of this, there’s a dive into using graphics for your games with PyGame: you’ll cover how to animate the graphics, manage collision detection, as well as use sounds, images, and sprites. To bring all these concepts together, the book guides you through making a graphical obstacle-dodging game.

This book is well done, and the fact that each project is a self-contained unit makes it appealing and accessible. If you’re someone who likes to learn by doing, then you’ll enjoy this book.

The fact that this book introduces concepts only as needed can be a possible disadvantage. While it’s organized more as a guide than a reference, the broad range of contents taught in the context of familiar games makes this one of the best books for learning Python. (Reviewed by David Schlesinger.)

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