About

What is pythonbooks?

I am an avid reader of /r/python and /r/learnpython and often come across questions like "What's the best Python book for beginners?", "What's the best intermediate Python book?", "What's the best Python book for learning Machine Learning?" etc. I figured that it would be interesting to create a guided repository of Python books that answers these questions. Since there are many Python books in the wild, the aim was to classify Python books into useful categories and then use a popularity scale so that the best books appear at the top.

How is it done?

A list of 600 unique paperback Python books was prepared, but only books published later than 2009 were kept to avoid listing outdated books.

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.

The top 100 books was then manually classified into categories and enriched with additional metadata. This includes links to homepages, links to the store of the publisher, Python version used in the book, topic tags, Python library tags etc. The metadata was used to create filters.

The site was built using Django , Bootstrap and Jquery. It is hosted on Heroku. The website is sustained by Amazon book links.

Newsletter

The site will be updated monthly and I will send a monthly newsletter so that you can stay updated about new Python books that come out every month. You can subscribe to the newsletter from the footer of the site.

Get in touch

Drop an email to hello@pythonbooks.org.