Ultimate Python study guide

Ultimate Python study guide for newcomers and professionals alike. 🐍 🐍 🐍

print("Ultimate Python study guide")

Motivation

I created a GitHub repo to share what I've learned about core Python over the past 5+ years of using it as a college graduate, an employee at large-scale companies and an open-source contributor of repositories like Celery and Full Stack Python. I look forward to seeing more people learn Python and pursue their passions through it. 🎓

Goals

Here are the primary goals of creating this guide:

🏆 Serve as a resource for Python newcomers who prefer to learn hands-on. This repository has a collection of standalone modules which can be run in an IDE like PyCharm and in the browser like Repl.it. Even a plain old terminal will work with the examples. Most lines have carefully crafted comments which guide a reader through what the programs are doing step-by-step. Users are encouraged to modify source code anywhere as long as the main routines are not deleted and run successfully after each change.

🏆 Serve as a pure guide for those who want to revisit core Python concepts. Only builtin libraries are leveraged so that these concepts can be conveyed without the overhead of domain-specific concepts. As such, popular open-source libraries and frameworks (i.e. sqlalchemy, requests, pandas) are not installed. However, reading the source code in these frameworks is inspiring and highly encouraged if your goal is to become a true Pythonista.

Table of contents

📚 = External resource, 🍰 = Beginner topic, 🤯 = Advanced topic

1. About Python
   • Overview: What is Python (📚, 🍰)
   • Design philosophy: The Zen of Python (📚)
   • Style guide: Style Guide for Python Code (📚, 🤯)
   • Data model: Data model (📚, 🤯)
   • Standard library: The Python Standard Library (📚, 🤯)
2. Syntax
   • Variable: Built-in literals (🍰)
   • Expression: Numeric operations (🍰)
   • Conditional: if | if-else | if-elif-else (🍰)
   • Loop: for-loop | while-loop (🍰)
   • Function: def | lambda (🍰)
3. Data Structures
   • List: List operations (🍰)
   • Tuple: Tuple operations
   • Set: Set operations
   • Dict: Dictionary operations (🍰)
   • Comprehension: list | tuple | set | dict
   • String: String operations (🍰)
   • Time complexity: cPython operations (📚, 🤯)
4. Classes
   • Basic class: Basic definition (🍰)
   • Abstract class: Abstract definition
   • Exception class: Exception definition
   • Iterator class: Iterator definition | yield (🤯)
5. Advanced
   • Decorator: Decorator definition | wraps (🤯)
   • Metaclass: Metaclass definition (🤯)
   • Method resolution order: mro (🤯)
   • Asyncio: async | await (🤯)
   • Weak reference: weakref (🤯)
   • Benchmark: cProfile | pstats (🤯)
   • Context manager: Context managers (🤯)
   • Mocking: MagicMock | PropertyMock | patch (🤯)
   • Regular expression: search | findall | match | fullmatch (🤯)
   • Data format: json | xml | csv (🤯)

Additional resources

👔 = Interview resource, 🧪 = Code samples, 🧠 = Project ideas

GitHub repositories

Keep learning by reading from other well-regarded resources.

• TheAlgorithms/Python (👔, 🧪)
• faif/python-patterns (👔, 🧪)
• geekcomputers/Python (🧪)
• trekhleb/homemade-machine-learning (🧪)
• karan/Projects (🧠)
• MunGell/awesome-for-beginners (🧠)
• vinta/awesome-python
• academic/awesome-datascience
• josephmisiti/awesome-machine-learning
• ZuzooVn/machine-learning-for-software-engineers

Interactive practice

Keep practicing so that your coding skills don't get rusty.

• leetcode.com (👔)
• hackerrank.com (👔)
• kaggle.com (🧠)
• exercism.io
• projecteuler.net