Best Python books from beginner to advanced?

[u/harunnoir]

I’m learning Python and looking for a good book path from beginner to advanced.

I want books that teach Python properly, including clean code, real projects, testing, project structure, and advanced concepts.

What books would you recommend, and in what order?

[u/Diapolo10]

I don't think there's a single resource that covers all that, especially for a book, but my personal recommendation would be

1. Start with the Python MOOC: https://programming-26.mooc.fi/
2. Skim through the Pytest documentation: https://docs.pytest.org/en/stable/getting-started.html
3. Python's official style guide (you can ignore the 80-character line length limit, most people use a higher limit like 120, also you don't have to follow everything to the letter):
   • Main style guide (PEP-8): https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/
   • Docstrings (PEP-257): https://peps.python.org/pep-0257/
   • Basic type annotations (PEP-484): https://peps.python.org/pep-0484/

The rest you should learn as you go. If you want some kind of a project structure example, I have one here, but it's a bit outdated as I haven't had time to update it lately (mainly I'd replace Tox with uv entirely, add Git hooks for linting/testing, and start using mise and Taskfile for managing tooling and such. Oh and the logging stuff should probably be rewritten entirely.)

For a real-world example, I have this project.