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The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally Kindle Edition

by Cory Althoff (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 2,014 ratings

Part of: Very Short Introductions (407 books)

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I am a self-taught programmer. After a year of self-study, I learned to program well enough to land a job as a software engineer II at eBay. Once I got there, I realized I was severely under-prepared. I was overwhelmed by the amount of things I needed to know but hadn't learned yet. My journey learning to program, and my experience at my first job as a software engineer were the inspiration for this book.

This book is not just about learning to program; although you will learn to code. If you want to program professionally, it is not enough to learn to code; that is why, in addition to helping you learn to program, I also cover the rest of the things you need to know to program professionally that classes and books don't teach you. "The Self-taught Programmer" is a roadmap, a guide to take you from writing your first Python program, to passing your first technical interview. I divided the book into five sections:

1. Learn to program in Python 3 and build your first program.
2. Learn Object-oriented programming and create a powerful Python program to get you hooked.
3. Learn to use tools like Git, Bash, and regular expressions. Then use your new coding skills to build a web scraper.
4. Study Computer Science fundamentals like data structures and algorithms.
5. Finish with best coding practices, tips for working with a team, and advice on landing a programming job.

You CAN learn to program professionally. The path is there. Will you take it?

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I always keep a few copies of The Self-Taught Programmer around to give to anyone that comes to me for career advice."--Robin Abrams, Board Member, HCL Technologies, FactSet Research, Lattice Semiconductor and Sierra Wireless
"Want to learn to program professionally? Follow Cory's advice."-- David Phillips, Co-Founder, Hackbright Academy
"I am incredibly impressed with this book." --JoAnn Buchanan, Senior Research Associate, Allen Institute for Brain Science
"Learning to program is increasingly important in finance. Althoff's book taught me the skills I need to stay competitive." --Derek Schaefer, Senior Finance Manager, Charles Schwab
"The Self-Taught Programmer was a pleasure to read--something I never thought I would say about a technical book."--Melinda Sacks, Former Writer, Editor, San Jose Mercury News
"One of the best Software Design books of all time" -- BookAuthority

From the Author

I spent one year writing The Self-Taught Programmer. It was an exciting and rewarding experience. I treated my book like a software project. After I finished writing it, I created a program to pick out all of the code examples from the book and execute them in Python to make sure all 300+ examples worked properly. Then I wrote software to add line numbers and color to every code example. Finally, I had a group of 200 new programmers "beta read" the book to identify poorly explained concepts and look for any errors my program missed. Another note: this book is meant for new programmers. If you already are a professional programmer, this book is probably not the right book for you.
I hope you learn as much reading my book as I did writing it. Best of luck with your programming!

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01M01YDQA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Triangle Connection LLC; 1st edition (December 26, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 26, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 8030 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 301 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #65,313 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10 in Software Development (Kindle Store)
- #12 in Python Computer Programming
- #14 in Computer Software (Kindle Store)

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4.5 2,014 ratings

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Cory Althoff

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Cory Althoff is an executive and author whose work includes The Self-Taught Programmer and The Self-Taught Computer Scientist. After graduating from Clemson University with a major in political science, he taught himself to program, eventually becoming a software engineer at eBay. His books have been translated into eight languages, and he has been featured in publications like Forbes and CNBC. Cory is a senior vice president at CompTIA, the leading IT certification provider for the global technology industry and its workforce.

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nathan last

Greate book!

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2023

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Well written book, suitable for all ages. Explaining the basic from scratch, and opening many doors for further learning. I really enjoyed it, and recommend it for everyone looking for learning python and programming basics.

2 people found this helpful

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powder

It's a great book for any new python programmer

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2017

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It's a great book for any new python programmer, especially those that learn in the self-taught way. It has a lot of examples and explanations that allow a reader to build the mental model of the language through experimentation. It is one of few books that adequately covered things in the way that you tend to model things when you -are- learning on your own. There's normally a strong possibility for gaps in knowledge when teaching yourself due to the way you can make assumptions without testing what the results would be, and this book doesn't necessarily cover ALL of them, but it does a good job with the numerous code samples of providing you fairly complete mental models of what's going on when you do various tasks in Python.

I love that it takes that approach. I do wish that it covered some more of what is considered idiomatic in Python, but, that's very much a minor gripe on an excellent text for a certain kind of mindset and way of learning. Even with that being said there are a few chapters near the end that cover some best practices and ideas, but, not as deeply as I typically think about them.

All in all a good resource that will help guide someone that's learning on their own on how to understand the language and achieve basic competence.

6 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Well written and easy to read

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2023

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I thought it would be dry, but find it easy to move through.

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2017

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VERY well written, excellent style. If you are a complete beginner it may advance too rapidly; it actually starts out quite basic, and if you are intermediate level and have been playing with Python for a while (as I) you can just breeze over the elementary stuff. I found the chapter(s) on OOP (classes etc.) particularly useful. I have been doing mostly functional and procedural type short programs and haven't paid much attention to OOP. But I am trying to get a handle on it now, (as I must if I'm gonna get anywhere with GA). The concepts were explained with code examples very clearly and in few pages! The section on BaSH is mostly review-over for me as I have been using Linux for a while now, but if you are also new to Linux (and you should get into it and dump MS ... don't get me started ...) it provides a very good intro to the command line and basic Linux usage, as well as "regular expressions" which are very good to know and apparently trip a lot of people up learning. You can even download the code snippets if you are too lazy to type them in (using the tinyurl web site).

I am now working on the web scraper and plan to elaborate it for my own use (hint: don't you hate it when cool web sites won't 'let' you download the videos and full size pics ...).

Recommend highly!

8 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

This book is so good, I asked for more

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2017

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I'm in tech recruiting for experienced software engineers - we need to know our stuff if we don't want to get laughed away. I thought this was a great way to understand what I need to know in a very straight-forward way, and I was not wrong. This book really changed the way I recruit and has really influenced my perspective of professional programming in a way that makes conversations more interesting and effective. In fact, it's even encouraged me to try some of it and I've made a github account with some very basic practicing. I liked what I learned so much that I actually reached out to the author and asked if he would donate a few of these to the Django Girl's workshop I co-organize in Seattle, Washington, and he said yes! It's a workshop that aims to increase the presence of women in the tech industry and so this book is super relevant to the mission. To be clear, I would've given this book a five star rating anyway, but the graciousness of the author gives it an extra verbal star to boot.

Thanks for helping all us gals out!

3 people found this helpful

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Daniel Honor

It help's to have some programming back ground.

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2020

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This programming is new to me and specially python I had trouble down loading python 3.5.1 because it was out
dated I had to update it to 3.8.1. I had problems with some of the programming when I type it into the python shell
some times it with work other times I with get syntax errors it won't let the program run. And I did it the way the book
explain it so may be there something I did't understand.

One person found this helpful

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Armando Leon

Reviews for a friend Interested in programming career

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2021

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I wish I read this book when I started my career. I too felt the pains the author felt when he started his career. I have a friend wanting to start a career in programming. I wanted to read it before I recommend it to him. I think this book perfectly compartemalizes what you should look at or things to learn right after you learn to code. If you're a engineer beginning your career , this book will help. If you're a year or 2 in for your career, this book contains info you've already picked up. I won't discredit it because of that. In my book it's a 5 star-rating because the author accomplished the goal he set, with the intended audience he had in mind.

4 people found this helpful

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AAK @mercator88

Tells you what you really need to know

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2018

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After learning FORTRAN and procedural programming decades ago, I was at a lost when trying to retool with OOP languages such as Python. I read a couple of books that went over code and concepts. But I felt like something was missing. I could write simplistic programs but didn't think I was utilizing the full benefit of Python.

Althoff's book helped fill in the gaps. He gave the most lucid explanation of OOP concepts that I've come across, as well as touching on practical subjects such as the command line, bash, regex, and GitHub. As a result I feel more empowered to write meaningful code. There's also a lot of good advice in the book about how to code.

Other books will contain more information about syntax and GUIs. Read one of them, then buy Althoff's book. It's really a must-read if you're trying to learn Python on your own.

27 people found this helpful

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Person

good overal guide for self taught

Reviewed in Canada on July 7, 2023

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Good book, it was both wide spanning and definite on several topics within Comp Sci. A definate must read for those working towards jobs in the field without degrees.

Mr Roy M. (Nottingham)

Excellent book ✅️ 😊

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2024

Verified Purchase

I am still working through this book but so far I have found it to be excellent. Definitely worth the money spent.
Cory explains really well, with examples and provides solutions that are in light print, compared to the rest of the reading text.

When you first download and install Python, I strongly recommend it is the latest version and to also download and install 'PyCharm' instead of 'Idle' which you need to enter your coding and to run it.
Idle is very basic, looks like notepad on a pc whereas PyCharm looks way better, easier to edit your coding and makes the learning process far more enjoyable. Download the free 'Community Version' of PyCharm, for now.
You can install both if you want and see what you think.
I've placed shortcuts on my laptop homescreen to launch the program quickly. You can, of course, have Idle/PyCharm icon on your lower screen taskbar so it's automatically there every time you turn your pc on.

Criticisms of the book ......
The paper quality of the book is poor but overall I still give 5✴️ (5 stars).
When you come to the subject of one of four data structures, namely 'Dictionary',
you must make sure you use curly brackets {} for this, which contains your elements and NOT parentheses ()
As mentioned, because the print is light in the examples and the font being a bit small, it is very easy to mistake the brackets for normal curved parentheses ()
Talking about data structures, Cory does NOT mention the 'Set' data structure which is used for unique special elements and works very well when you are dealing with 'union', 'intersection' ....

I also recommend that you work through the book slowly at a pace you are happy with and practice typing in the coding to boost your confidence and to see the result of your efforts. You will make errors in your coding and so see red error messages telling you on which line number your error is on, which can be very frustrating especially if you struggle to see the problem, but don't let that deter you.

I have learnt a lot already and I'm amazed and very pleased with how much I now know about Python, so thoroughly enjoying it, over the past month or so since I started as a beginner. You must be patient, keep at it and only do small manageable chunks at a time, not too much in one day. Experiment with the coding and see what the result is. Take notes to help you. I take screen shots on my mobile phone as well, to quickly view a program and refreshing myself with what I have learnt, without carrying a book or laptop with you, which I find does helps a lot in the learning process.

Take a look at other resources, online for example to help you understand and progress.
If you are stuck, Google the issue where you will find many useful helpful comments.
If you purchase from Amazon, download the free sample that is often provided to give you a taster of the book you are looking at. Also, make sure you read the reviews so you know what others think before you decide to buy or not. Take a look at the books publication date as well as some books are a number of years old and so there's a good chance the coding programs would of been run on an older version of Python.

I hope I have helped and given you some encouragement, if only a little. God bless you, enjoy! :)

Stefano Diciotti

Fantastico

Reviewed in Italy on January 28, 2022

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Libro dalla struttura molto semplice che va "dritto al punto". Ottimo per avere un'idea delle varie possibilità a disposizione quando si impara un nuovo linguaggio di programmazione come Python (con qualche accenno a Bash e controllo versione). Consigliato a chi è alle primissime armi, ma anche a chi conosce ed utilizza già questi strumenti ma necessita di "riordinare le idee".

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FAI

Buena introducción al mundo del software.

Reviewed in Spain on March 30, 2021

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Creo que este libro consigue algo muy difícil: que al terminar de leerlo, y practicarlo, se tenga ya una idea de lo que es la programación, ofreciendo, además muy buena información para desarrollarse en esta profesión.

La información se ofrece de una manera simple, práctica y optimista, pero, a la vez, realista y rigurosa.

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Alex Gallegos

Nice book!

Reviewed in Mexico on October 3, 2019

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It's the perfect book for beginners. As soon as I got home I started reading it and I made my first Python program in minutes. Easy to read (even for me that I'm not native English speaker), nice letter size and well structured. 100% recommended.

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The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally Kindle Edition

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Cory Althoff

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