Best Python Books For Beginner and Expert

As the year draws to a close and everyone switches their Google searches to best python books 2023, I thought it might be a good idea to address the wildly popular issue, "If I want to learn Python, what books should I read?" There are several articles on the subject, and pretty much every article will point you toward Automate the Boring Stuff, but I felt it was time for me to enter the fray. If you're not a regular reader, I've done this with podcasts, twitter accounts, and newsletters a few times in the past.

It takes a lot more work to format my code from a shaky jupyter notebook to a somewhat attractive jupyter notebook, so I guess I'm not really sorry. So this time, we're simply going to look at the results and my illogical commentary! Anyway, let's get to the important stuff now: the best Python books to read in 2023.

So which one should I read if I'm a beginner?

So if we filter down the list above which books are primarily for beginners, you end up with a solid starting point:

  1. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners by Al Sweigart
  2. Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming by Eric Matthes
  3. Learning Python by Mark Lutz
  4. Grokking Algorithms An Illustrated Guide For Programmers and Other Curious People by Aditya Y. Bhargava
  5. Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney

The top five books there are simply those. Grokking Algorithms uses Python for its examples even though it focuses more on the computer science side of coding than the language itself. And Python for Data Analysis is mostly centered on the pandas Python package, where any data scientist or analyst will spend the majority of their working hours. Dedicate your attention to Automate the Boring Stuff, Python Crash Course, and Learning Python if you are a true novice.