6 ms·

Show HN: 100 Python books, categorized and ranked

150 points by gh1 9y ago

gh1 9y ago
I created PythonBooks as a side project. The website is a guided repository of Python books and currently lists the best 100 books. It classifies these books into fine grained categories and shows the best books in each category. It has filters for Python version, free and non free books etc. For the beginner book section, you can even filter the books by topics that you want to learn.
- johnnyballgame 9y ago
  Nitpicking, but I would suggest reversing the chronological order of Publication Year. Newer release years towards the top.
  - gh1 9y ago
    That's actually a very good point because people are more likely to look for recent books. Will change that in the next update.
- chrisgd 9y ago
  Thanks for your hard work
  - gh1 9y ago
    Thanks! I had a lot of fun making the site. I am also committed to keeping it comprehensive and updated. Made a powerful admin interface so that syncing would only take about 3-4 hours per week of my time. There's about 600 Python books out there according to my best estimate, so there's a lot of ground to cover.
peteretep 9y ago
Very few of: http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-python/ http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-py... Are for experienced programmers new to Python, which is a shame.
- gh1 9y ago
  The books in that section are topical books or reference books that contain a condensed introduction to Python in the beginning.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
quangv 9y ago
Pretty sweet! Anything similar for JavaScript? This is prolly there best list of Python books I've seen. Great job!
- gh1 9y ago
  Thank you!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
paki123 9y ago
Not trying to be inflammatory, but why the need for books? Inspiration? Or do they come with nuggets of gold? I'm just use to googling everything so forgive me for my ignorance.
paki123 9y ago
Not trying to be inflammatory, but why the need for books? Inspiration? Or do they come with nuggets of gold? I'm just use to googling everything so forgive me for my ignorance.
sixhobbits 9y ago
I wish I could be flattered that my book "Flask by Example" appears above the seminal "Two Scoops of Django" in the "Web Development" section[0], but instead I'm just left wondering how "Popularity Score" is calculated. We're only given: "The scores are based on a combination of the popularity of the book and relevance to the topic. The best possible score is 100 and the worst is 0." [0] http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/ http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/
- gh1 9y ago
  Two Scoops of Django is one of my favorite books! As to how popularity score is calculated: I used the Amazon Bestseller Rank of the book to assign a score for popularity. This rank loosely indicates how many copies of the book were bought recently. I found this to be well correlated with quality (I know many of these books by experience, and I found that the ones that I already knew to be good books rose to the top). In addition, when you filter for topics in the beginner section, another score is assigned based on relevance to those topics. This was a bit more work. I went through the contents of the book manually and tagged each book by the topics it covers and the percentage of the book devoted to that topic. After the relevance score is computed, it is combined with the popularity score to get a final score.
  - kronos29296 9y ago
    What about the free ones like Dive into python, LPTHW and others. People won't buy as much as the non free ones so the ratings may not be as accurate.
    - gh1 9y ago
      Good point. I bump the ranks of the free books slightly to adjust for that. Similarly, for books that have multiple editions, I make some adjustments to avoid penalizing these books for fragmentation.
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    Is Two Scoops on Amazon? I remember buying it (and some others - seems quite common for self published Dev books?) through leanpub or something like that.
martinmusio7 9y ago
It structures the world of relevant python books quite well. Thanks, I appreciate it!
- gh1 9y ago
  Glad that you find it helpful.
johnnyballgame 9y ago
The excellent "Two Scoops of Django" is now on version 1.11. https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-11 https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django...
- gh1 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. That book came out very recently (a week ago?) and my database is a few weeks old.
O4epegb 9y ago
Would be cool to see what python version is used in the book
- gh1 9y ago
  You can see that. On the pages that list books, there is a Python version filter. In desktops and tablets, it appears on the sidebar to the left. On mobile devices, the filter is collapsed and appears on the top right. On the book pages, the Python version information is available on the sidebar. On mobile devices, click on the Vital Stats link on the top to see this information.
  - O4epegb 9y ago
    Oh nice, thanks. Did not see that on mobile at first.
elymar 9y ago
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurelien Geron is also pretty great. Would like to see that in the list.
bogomipz 9y ago
The site states: "The Bestseller Rank was chosen as the popularity scale. The Bestseller Rank loosely indicates how many copies of the book were bought recently on Amazon. This turns out to be well correlated with quality." Why should popularity automatically equate to quality? Here are a couple of examples where this is not true. For instance if I search by "algorithm and data structure." I see "Data Structure and Algorithmic Thinking with Python: Data Structure and Algorithmic Puzzles "by by Narasimha Karumanchi ranked above "Data Structures and Algorithms in Python" by Michael T. Goodrich. The book by Narasimha Karumanchi is absolutely terrible, it's filled with typos, plagiarisms, poor English and code that simply doesn't work. So why is it ranked higher? Probably because the Michael T. Goodrich book is an expensive(but quality)text book while the Narasimha Karumanchi book is just plain cheap. Even look at the user reviews on Amazon for Karumanchi book, its an abomination. Also there are a number Packt Publishing titles on here. Looking at these rankings you might believe that one of their books is 3rd most popular or 4th most popular so they must be of decent quality. However Packt Publishing are generally not very good quality publications, they are often not spell-checked, have grammatical errors and often do little more than paraphrase existing documentation. They just crank out titles with little regard for quality - 'make 'em cheap and lots of them.' If I search by "Intermediate" books. I see a Packt Publishing title ranked above the "Powerful Python: The Most Impactful Patterns, Features, and Development Strategies Modern Python Provides"by Aaron Maxwell which is an excellent book. Why is it not as popular? Possibly because the author also sold the book DRM-free on their own website?
- gh1 9y ago
  Some very good points indeed. Let me address them one by one. > Why should popularity automatically equate to quality? Popularity is the by far the best indicator of quality that I could find. HN, for example, also operates on this principle. The posts with the highest votes get to the top. However, this does not mean that the posts that do not get as many votes are not as high quality. dang has mentioned this several times and went on so far as to say that high quality posts getting overlooked is one of the biggest problems of HN. One of the ways HN solves this problem is by using moderator discretion to put some overlooked posts in the front page, overriding the algorithm (I believe this post was one of them, it had just 5 points when it was put on the front page). In the same way, I use some editorial discretion to penalize books that have typos and poor English, if I could detect this by going through the Amazon preview. Some books were not even included in the list for this reason, most of them being independently published books. However, the book by Narasimha Karumanchi escaped my attention. Thanks for mentioning that it has typos etc. I will review it again. However, just as HN tries to provide value by best effort quality ranking, PythonBooks also makes a best effort attempt at judging quality. It is not perfect, but it's the best I could do. If you have a better idea, let me know. I am all for improving the site. > However Packt Publishing are generally not very good quality publications Don't agree with this. Many Packt books are high quality. I have read several, including the one by Dusty Phillips, which is above Powerful Python. I do not share the same prejudice about this publication. > Possibly because the author also sold the book DRM-free on their own website? Possibly also because the book is relatively new and will only get more popular with time. The scores are dynamic and changes every week when I sync my database. Like Powerful Python, most other books are also available outside Amazon, so it's mostly a level playing field. The exception is genuinely free books like Automate the Boring Stuff. These books get a blanket score bump to adjust for this. Hope I could answer some of your questions and thanks for taking your time to provide feedback.

150 points by gh1 9y ago

gh1 9y ago

I created PythonBooks as a side project. The website is a guided repository of Python books and currently lists the best 100 books. It classifies these books into fine grained categories and shows the best books in each category. It has filters for Python version, free and non free books etc. For the beginner book section, you can even filter the books by topics that you want to learn.

johnnyballgame 9y ago
Nitpicking, but I would suggest reversing the chronological order of Publication Year. Newer release years towards the top.
- gh1 9y ago
  That's actually a very good point because people are more likely to look for recent books. Will change that in the next update.
chrisgd 9y ago
Thanks for your hard work
- gh1 9y ago
  Thanks! I had a lot of fun making the site. I am also committed to keeping it comprehensive and updated. Made a powerful admin interface so that syncing would only take about 3-4 hours per week of my time. There's about 600 Python books out there according to my best estimate, so there's a lot of ground to cover.

peteretep 9y ago

Very few of: http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-python/ http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-py... Are for experienced programmers new to Python, which is a shame.

gh1 9y ago
The books in that section are topical books or reference books that contain a condensed introduction to Python in the beginning.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

quangv 9y ago

Pretty sweet! Anything similar for JavaScript? This is prolly there best list of Python books I've seen. Great job!

gh1 9y ago
Thank you!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

paki123 9y ago

Not trying to be inflammatory, but why the need for books? Inspiration? Or do they come with nuggets of gold? I'm just use to googling everything so forgive me for my ignorance.

paki123 9y ago

Not trying to be inflammatory, but why the need for books? Inspiration? Or do they come with nuggets of gold? I'm just use to googling everything so forgive me for my ignorance.

sixhobbits 9y ago

I wish I could be flattered that my book "Flask by Example" appears above the seminal "Two Scoops of Django" in the "Web Development" section[0], but instead I'm just left wondering how "Popularity Score" is calculated. We're only given: "The scores are based on a combination of the popularity of the book and relevance to the topic. The best possible score is 100 and the worst is 0." [0] http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/ http://pythonbooks.org/topical-books/web-development/

gh1 9y ago
Two Scoops of Django is one of my favorite books! As to how popularity score is calculated: I used the Amazon Bestseller Rank of the book to assign a score for popularity. This rank loosely indicates how many copies of the book were bought recently. I found this to be well correlated with quality (I know many of these books by experience, and I found that the ones that I already knew to be good books rose to the top). In addition, when you filter for topics in the beginner section, another score is assigned based on relevance to those topics. This was a bit more work. I went through the contents of the book manually and tagged each book by the topics it covers and the percentage of the book devoted to that topic. After the relevance score is computed, it is combined with the popularity score to get a final score.
- kronos29296 9y ago
  What about the free ones like Dive into python, LPTHW and others. People won't buy as much as the non free ones so the ratings may not be as accurate.
  - gh1 9y ago
    Good point. I bump the ranks of the free books slightly to adjust for that. Similarly, for books that have multiple editions, I make some adjustments to avoid penalizing these books for fragmentation.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  Is Two Scoops on Amazon? I remember buying it (and some others - seems quite common for self published Dev books?) through leanpub or something like that.

martinmusio7 9y ago

It structures the world of relevant python books quite well. Thanks, I appreciate it!

gh1 9y ago
Glad that you find it helpful.

johnnyballgame 9y ago

The excellent "Two Scoops of Django" is now on version 1.11. https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-11 https://www.twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django...

gh1 9y ago
Thanks for pointing that out. That book came out very recently (a week ago?) and my database is a few weeks old.

O4epegb 9y ago

Would be cool to see what python version is used in the book

gh1 9y ago
You can see that. On the pages that list books, there is a Python version filter. In desktops and tablets, it appears on the sidebar to the left. On mobile devices, the filter is collapsed and appears on the top right. On the book pages, the Python version information is available on the sidebar. On mobile devices, click on the Vital Stats link on the top to see this information.
- O4epegb 9y ago
  Oh nice, thanks. Did not see that on mobile at first.

elymar 9y ago

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurelien Geron is also pretty great. Would like to see that in the list.

bogomipz 9y ago

The site states: "The Bestseller Rank was chosen as the popularity scale. The Bestseller Rank loosely indicates how many copies of the book were bought recently on Amazon. This turns out to be well correlated with quality." Why should popularity automatically equate to quality? Here are a couple of examples where this is not true. For instance if I search by "algorithm and data structure." I see "Data Structure and Algorithmic Thinking with Python: Data Structure and Algorithmic Puzzles "by by Narasimha Karumanchi ranked above "Data Structures and Algorithms in Python" by Michael T. Goodrich. The book by Narasimha Karumanchi is absolutely terrible, it's filled with typos, plagiarisms, poor English and code that simply doesn't work. So why is it ranked higher? Probably because the Michael T. Goodrich book is an expensive(but quality)text book while the Narasimha Karumanchi book is just plain cheap. Even look at the user reviews on Amazon for Karumanchi book, its an abomination. Also there are a number Packt Publishing titles on here. Looking at these rankings you might believe that one of their books is 3rd most popular or 4th most popular so they must be of decent quality. However Packt Publishing are generally not very good quality publications, they are often not spell-checked, have grammatical errors and often do little more than paraphrase existing documentation. They just crank out titles with little regard for quality - 'make 'em cheap and lots of them.' If I search by "Intermediate" books. I see a Packt Publishing title ranked above the "Powerful Python: The Most Impactful Patterns, Features, and Development Strategies Modern Python Provides"by Aaron Maxwell which is an excellent book. Why is it not as popular? Possibly because the author also sold the book DRM-free on their own website?

gh1 9y ago
Some very good points indeed. Let me address them one by one. > Why should popularity automatically equate to quality? Popularity is the by far the best indicator of quality that I could find. HN, for example, also operates on this principle. The posts with the highest votes get to the top. However, this does not mean that the posts that do not get as many votes are not as high quality. dang has mentioned this several times and went on so far as to say that high quality posts getting overlooked is one of the biggest problems of HN. One of the ways HN solves this problem is by using moderator discretion to put some overlooked posts in the front page, overriding the algorithm (I believe this post was one of them, it had just 5 points when it was put on the front page). In the same way, I use some editorial discretion to penalize books that have typos and poor English, if I could detect this by going through the Amazon preview. Some books were not even included in the list for this reason, most of them being independently published books. However, the book by Narasimha Karumanchi escaped my attention. Thanks for mentioning that it has typos etc. I will review it again. However, just as HN tries to provide value by best effort quality ranking, PythonBooks also makes a best effort attempt at judging quality. It is not perfect, but it's the best I could do. If you have a better idea, let me know. I am all for improving the site. > However Packt Publishing are generally not very good quality publications Don't agree with this. Many Packt books are high quality. I have read several, including the one by Dusty Phillips, which is above Powerful Python. I do not share the same prejudice about this publication. > Possibly because the author also sold the book DRM-free on their own website? Possibly also because the book is relatively new and will only get more popular with time. The scores are dynamic and changes every week when I sync my database. Like Powerful Python, most other books are also available outside Amazon, so it's mostly a level playing field. The exception is genuinely free books like Automate the Boring Stuff. These books get a blanket score bump to adjust for this. Hope I could answer some of your questions and thanks for taking your time to provide feedback.