First and foremost, I’m not a programmer of any kind, but if you’re smart enough to create programs with coding, then I commend you, and The Ultimate Python Bookshelf by Packt from Humble Bundle might actually give you a boost in the learning process.
Just so you know of some programs that were written in Python, to give you some hope for your future, if you become a beast at it:
- YouTube
- Spotify
And that’s just to name a handful that you should know about. Definitely a powerful coding language to learn, if you’re up for it.
This bundle offers 24 ebooks in total, which is quite a lot to take in.
Questions & Concerns
Which charities does my money go toward?
Doctors Without Borders are an independent, global movement that provides medical aid wherever it’s needed most in their offices all around the world. They are made up of people from all over who share a common purpose of saving lives and alleviating the pain of those who suffer most.
Stop AAPI Hate are a community that stands united against xenophobia and bigotry toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States since the pandemic started. They track and respond to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying.
Is the Ultimate Python Bookshelf worthy of me?
It seems Packt has received some bad reputation over the years for their ebooks and how they’ve been written–or rather, how they approach people to write the ebooks–but let’s face it, what big company (or small one) hasn’t received some kind of bad publicity these days?
It’s all a matter of how you want to learn things and where you want to start.
Want to start cheap and by helping by a charitable means? Humble Bundle might be the way to go, as it’ll obviously net you a lot of informational ebooks on Python that you may or may not get through.
Shoot, I bought a language learning bundle consisting of a variety of languages I thought would be cool to learn, but I hardly got around to any since work had me so busy through the months I’d had the subscription for them.
But I don’t regret it, because my money went to a charitable cause.
And yelling at least one German phrase to my coworker was fun. Even if it was me saying what my name was.
Remember: Even if you don’t like the products listed in the Humble Book Bundle: The Ultimate Python Bookshelf, your money does go to a good cause of your choice.
The Ultimate Python Bookshelf – Pay $1 to Unlock
The Python Workshop
Initial eBook price: $27.99
A good introductory course if you’re wanting to start learning the language of Python and haven’t really delved into it too much yet. This workshop is actually an interactive tutorial which is even better than a book, in my opinion.
In fact, whenever I bought books on writing, back when I was actually working on my novel, I preferred the ones that had exercises on them to strengthen writing in specific areas, instead of just reading about someone talking about a subject.
There’s a reason people fall asleep in English class, more often than not.
In this workshop, you’ll step in as a beginner and emerge with the knowledge of building and using simple machine learning algorithms.
The Statistics and Calculus with Python Workshop
Initial eBook price: $24.99
If you mentioned Calculus to me these days I would straight up ask to be excused and walk away, out of your life forever, because me and math have never got along.
Actually, scratch that. I remember I loved math when I was a kid. I would go out to book stores and buy math equation books and have fun trying to solve all the problems. And then the problems got a little more problematic with the whole problem-solving ordeal and things went a bit downhill with me and the school subject. In fact, I had my dad help me with my math homework one night and I ended up getting an F on it, so…yeah.
Math isn’t my family’s strong suit.
However, it’s something you’re going to have to deal with when it comes to Python. There are going to be mathematical tasks and algebraic functions and calculus concepts and statistics to get through.
By the end of this workshop, you’ll have learned how to develop Python applications to solve business challenges.
Web Development with Django Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $29.99 |
| Don’t worry if you’re not a fan of cooking. Django seems to be easy to learn–at least, that’s what it says. Just remember saying and doing are two completely different things.
It’s a powerful framework featuring third party modules for web development. Now, I can’t exactly say what that means, because I’m not in the programming business, but I know everything needs some kind of framework to create stability. |
The Ultimate Python Bookshelf – Pay $10 or More to Unlock
Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with Python
| Initial eBook price: $20.99 |
| Crack your knuckles for some hands-on knowledge with this data analysis book.
Personally, I’m someone who learns a lot more by listening, reading, and watching. Unfortunately, that’s not always something that can be done, so typically most people can only get one thing out of the three. If hands-on is your thing, then great. (Actually, I don’t know how hands-on you can get with a book, but we’re going to go ahead and overlook our inquisitive side for now.) By the end of the book, you’ll gain the knowledge on the four main pillars of EDA:
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Hands-On Machine Learning with scikit-learn and Scientific Python Toolkits
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| This book seems to be for those who want to learn more on how to incorporate scikit-learn in with your other Python learning skills and starts with an explanation of its concepts and fundamentals. Every chapter of the book takes you through different algorithms, using practical examples, and showing how to solve real-life problems (we’re still talking programming language here, and not like relationship problem or life debt problems, okay?).
By the end of the book, you’ll know how to take a data-driven approach to machine learning solutions and formulate problems at hand. |
Django 3 By Example
| Initial eBook price: $34.99 |
The first Django book mentioned in the tier 1 section was more in the beginner’s area, but this one is if you want to scale the steps upwards in the professional web applications of programming. This book teaches you a lot, and includes learning about three main Django 3 features, as well as the main, meaty portion that centers around building the following:
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Python Automation Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| This is an updated version that caters to the newest recipes for Python 3.8 and higher.
Every time I see cookbook in the title, I can’t help but compare an actual cookbook with what’s you’re actually going to be learning within the actual book. So there are three new chapters, right?
Well if you’ve ever cooked in the kitchen before, or if you haven’t and don’t ever plan to, then think about if you had to suddenly start focusing on cooking in the kitchen for one reason or another. You’ve got to test some appliances that you’ve never tried before. And that would also go hand-in-hand with machine learning, I guess. And the messy data? Well, you haven’t cooked properly unless you’ve made a mess. Personally, I think these books are properly named. Analogies aside, by the end of the book, you’ll know how to create graphs and charts, automate marketing campaigns, identify monotonous tasks, and resolve process inefficiencies. |
Hands-On Genetic Algorithms with Python
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| I kept thinking “genetic” was actually “generic” the whole time I was reading the information of the book, and then I looked at the title I wrote and wondered if I wrote it wrong. So I read everything again, and no, I wrote it right, I just read everything wrong.
After that little revelation, this book will teach you the differences between genetic algorithms and traditional algorithms and the types of problems they can solve, and then how you can apply them to search and optimization problems, like planning, scheduling, gaming, and analytics. I’m not really sure about all of that, except for gaming–that’s my type of language. |
The Ultimate Python Bookshelf – Pay $18 or More to Unlock
Python Data Cleaning Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $31.99 |
| Data isn’t good if you don’t know how to clean it up. If you make a mess of it, after all, something bad is bound to happen, and then you’ll just have to sift through the mess to find where the problem is.
I don’t know if it’s exactly the same thing, but whenever I’m trying to figure something out with CSS and go to different sites with people asking questions about the coding that they use, there are others offering up helpful answers who also clean up the code the original poster had given and it just slims things down and makes it less sloppy or doesn’t take up as much useless code. Less is more, as they say. In this book, you’ll be able to clean data and diagnose problems while performing key tasks, handling missing values, validating errors, removing duplicate data, monitoring high volumes of data, and more. |
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| This is the second edition that dives into an example-rich guide to reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL algorithms.
While the entirety of the book centers itself on having you conquer most of all the deep penetration that RL has to offer in real-world projects, you’ll also learn about the algorithms of DQN, TRPO, PPO and ACKTR, DDPG, TD3, and SAC, whatever the hell those acronyms mean, because I can only guess and my guesses will only be way off base. |
Data Engineering with Python
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| I might not know much about engineering, but I know about analytics, because I have to look at the analytics of my two websites almost every day, since I’m anal about what posts are getting attention and which posts aren’t. And data engineering basically provides the foundation for analytics and data science.
Not sure this is quite the type of analytics of what I look at, but perhaps a small portion. In this book, you’ll learn how to build data pipelines and work with large datasets, and then varying degrees of complex data while running quality checks and whatnot. Yeah, I’ll just look at the numbers, thanks. |
Modern Python Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $39.99 |
| This book is perfect for someone who’s starting out, as they can use the book from start to eventual finish if they wanted.
It comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python, so, unfortunately, if you wait too long to get involved with the book, I guess they could update Python, but I don’t see how that could destroy the quality of the book as a whole. The recipes themselves range from beginner level to expert, so no worries where your Python skills lay, and it’s set up into 13 different chapters for ease of access. |
Applying Math with Python
| Initial eBook price: $20.99 |
| Hold on, let me retake grade school math and catch up to all you calculus geniuses so I can figure out what in the hell is being talked about in this book synopsis.
So basically, in Python you’ll be needing some knowledge in the mathematics department for machine learning and data science. Of course, I only mentioned calculus as a little joke. This book is going to teach you so much more than that, including the following:
Not to mention Python’s scientific stack of core skills like NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. You better be a math genius by the end of it all is all I’m saying. |
Python Image Processing Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $31.99 |
| Here’s where you’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of learning the relevant tools and algorithms for analysis and visualization for image processing.
Can you image the programming it would take for what we see on a show like Bones or CSI where we see them do a facial reconstruction of broken bones fusing back together, or just zooming in through skin and muscle to a bullet wound on the inside and seeing the trajectory of it play out? Whew. Now, I don’t know if this book can teach you all that, but hey, there’s face morphing, image segmentation, object detection, cartooning, and others, so it’s a starting area. |
Python Feature Engineering Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| An invaluable and resourceful book for those looking to develop your machine learning model skills. With it, you’ll be better able to simplify and improve upon the quality of your code.
Some of the different feature engineering strategies you’ll come across are:
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Practical Python Programming for IoT
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| IoT stands for The Internet of Things, and the purpose of this book is to give you proper IoT development skills and the knowledge to build sophisticated IoT systems using Python.
It makes sense, seeing as we officially live in the age of technology, where everyone has fitness bands, smart watches, smart phones, etc. There are three parts to this book. The first section focuses on the “Internet,” the second section focuses on the fundamentals behind the electronics and GPIO interfacing, and the third section gets into the “Things” aspect of IoT. |
Python Algorithmic Trading Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $31.99 |
| The only trading I’ve ever done is in video games, and even that is limited. I don’t even like the idea of trading Pokemon just to get the ones you can’t catch in-game. It’s bogus.
Anyway, in this book you’ll learn the important aspects of financial markets and fetch financial instruments, query and calculate various types of candles and historical data, plus compute and plot technical indicators. Toward the end you’ll go through backtesting, paper trading, and real trading. There’s even effective decision strategies that even human traders wouldn’t have been able to touch upon. It’s interesting to note that the concepts explained in this book are globally applicable. While you might not be able to use Zerodha, an Indian Stock Market broker, because you aren’t an Indian resident and can’t open an account with them, you can apply the same concepts elsewhere. |
Applied Computational Thinking with Python
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| Computational thinking helps develop logical processing and algorithmic thinking while solving problems in economics, mathematics, and artificial intelligence.
This books will help you come to grips with the following elements while also designing solutions for other challenging problems:
You’ll also learn about various techniques involved in problem analysis, logical reasoning, algorithm design, clusters and classification, data analysis, and modeling, and understand how they can become combined with computational thinking elements for algorithmic solutions. |
Hands-On Python Natural Language Processing
| Initial eBook price: $31.99 |
| Just as a refresher, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) is found in various domains of web search, advertisements, and customer services.
And yes, I said that more for my benefit. In this book, you’ll understand the core concepts of NLP and deep learning, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), semantic embedding, Word2vec, and more. You’ll learn how to perform each and every task using neural networks, which might not be as scary as it sounds. Because it sounds like we’re doing brain surgery on a comatose patient over here. By the end, you’ll know how to build deep learning-backed NLP applications and overcome NLP challenges. |
Hands-On Simulation Modeling with Python
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| Simulation modeling–not to be confused with wanting to create a digital model of King Kong climbing a building, clutching a pedestrian in his hand.
Instead, it helps you create digital prototypes of physical models to analyze how they work and predict how they’ll perform in the real world. In this book, you’ll understand concepts of randomness and explore data generating processes, resampling methods, and bootstrapping techniques. There are also algorithms you’ll go over, like Monte Carlo simulations and Markov decision processes. By the end, you’ll know how to how to construct and deploy simulation models to overcome real-world challenges. |
Mastering Python Networking
| Initial eBook price: $34.99 |
| This is the Third Edition and it veers you from the path of traditional network engineers to network developers that now readily works with Python 3.
You’ll learn how to use newer libraries like pyATS and Nornir (which sounds like Norse mythology to me instead of any kind of coding network), as well as Ansible 2.8. Beginning with a basic overview, you’ll learn how to interact with both legacy and API-enabled network devices, which is nice, because not everyone keeps things up-to-date, and legacy devices are always going to be a thing, not just in networking. To end things, there’s the use of Jenkins for continuous integration and testing tools to verify networks. |
Artificial Intelligence with Python
| Initial eBook price: $34.99 |
| There’s intelligent life out there after all. It just comes in the form of Python.
The second edition is an expanded version of the original bestselling guide and provides you with an introduction to artificial intelligence with the tools needed to explore the world of intellectual apps and to create your own applications. It comes with seven new chapters on more advanced concepts of artificial intelligence and also explores real-world scenarios while teaching you how to apply relevant AI algorithm to a variety of problems. |
Python for Finance Cookbook
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| You know, I guess everything looks a little less daunting when looked at in a recipe-based approach. But I’m still not a fan of financing, so I’ll leave that up to everyone else who knows where they’re doing on the subject.
Which is hopefully you by the end of this book. You’ll be learning quite a bit, starting with calculating indicators used in technical analysis, like Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, and backtest automatic trading strategies. Toward the end, you’ll get into solving credit card fraud and be a hero to people everywhere. All while basing everything on a recipe approach. How about that? |
Learn Quantum Computing with Python and IBM Quantum Experience
| Initial eBook price: $27.99 |
| You’ve probably heard of quantum physics, but this is quantum mechanics–maybe not as fun, depending on who you ask.
IBM Quantum Experience is a platform that allows you as a developer to learn the basics of quantum computing. You’ll understand the difference between the kinds of quantum computers as well as the simulators, and eventually learn how to build quantum programs on your own with enough knowledge on quantum computing skills to apply them to your own business. |
