Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python: Best Practices for Writing Clean Code

Pdf Book Name: Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python: Best Practices for Writing Clean Code
Author: Al Sweigart
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN-10, 13: 1593279671,9781593279677,2020034288
Year: 2020
Pages: 321 / 386 Pages
Language: English
File size: 10 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python: Best Practices for Writing Clean Code Pdf Book Description:

Hello again, world! As a teenage programmer and wannabe hacker in the late 1990s, I would pore over the latest issues of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. One day, I finally summoned the courage to attend the magazine’s monthly meetup in my city and was in awe of how knowledgeable everyone else seemed. (Later, I’d realize that many of them had more confidence than actual knowledge.) I spent the entire meeting nodding along to what others were saying, trying to keep up with their conversations. I left that meetup determined to spend every waking hour studying computing, programming, and network security so I could join the discussions at the next month’s meetup. At the next meetup, I continued to just nod and feel dumb compared to everyone else. So again I resolved to study and become “smart enough” to keep up. Month after month, I would increase my knowledge but always felt behind. I began to realize the enormity of the computing field and worried I would never know enough. I knew more about programming than my high school friends but certainly not enough to get a job as a software developer. In the 1990s, Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia didn’t exist. But even if those resources were available, I wouldn’t have known how to use them; I wouldn’t have been sure what to study next. Instead, I learned how to write Hello, world! programs in different programming languages but still felt I wasn’t making real progress.

I didn’t know how to move beyond the basics. There’s so much more to software development than loops and functions. But once you’ve completed a beginner course or read an introductory programming book, your search for more guidance leads to yet another Hello, world! tutorial. Programmers often call this period the desert of despair: the time you spend wandering aimlessly through different learning materials, feeling like you’re not improving. You become too advanced for beginner materials but too inexperienced to tackle more complex topics. Those in this desert experience a strong sense of impostor syndrome. You don’t feel like a “real” programmer or know how to craft code the way “real” programmers do. I wrote this book to address this audience. If you’ve learned the basics of Python, this book should help you become a more capable software developer and lose this sense of despair. This book targets those who have completed a basic Python tutorial and want to know more. The tutorial you learned from could have been my previous book, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (No Starch Press, 2019), a book such as Python Crash Course (No Starch Press, 2019) by Eric Matthes, or an online course. These tutorials might have hooked you on programming, but you still need more skills. If you feel like you’re not yet at the professional programmer level but don’t know how to get to that level, this is the book for you.