"I have heard that when done with the book, I still won't be able to program in Python." Be careful about whose advice you take. There are a lot of programmers

"I have heard that when done with the book, I still won't be able to program in Python." Be careful about whose advice you take. There are a lot of programmers out there who are so far down the road to perfecting their craft that they can't see where they started. For a mature programmer, using powerful tools will aid them in expressing their complex ideas quickly. As a beginner, you'll experience a ton of "ah ha!" moments where an idea will come to you in code, rather than in abstract. It will start simple with data structures like dicts and will progress toward object-oriented structures. To say you won't be able to program when you finish LPTHW is to say that a 5th grader can't write. They're not going to write "The Great Gatsby", but they can write.