I wrote a book! It’s called “The Well-Grounded Python Developer”, published by Manning Publications. I think of the book as a way to help Python programmers become Python developers. It doesn’t teach Python; there are lots of resources that do that. My hope is that the book will enable you to use the tools you know in Python to build bigger and more substantial projects.
The metaphor I think about is having a hammer and saw and being able to cut some wood pieces and hammer them together. Where you’d like to go is to build some cabinetry.
The book is divided into two major sections: “Groundwork” and “Fieldwork”. The first section has several chapters that cover topics and techniques useful to Python developers. The second section uses those techniques to build a project over the rest of the chapters in the book.
The project uses Flask, a popular web framework for Python, to build a blogging application. Is the resulting blog application the end all, be all of blogging websites? Absolutely not. But the journey to completing it takes you along a manageable path to create a relatively sophisticated application.
I’ve gotten commentary about the book that it’s a Flask book. It’s true you’ll learn quite a bit about Flask, a nice side effect as it’s a great web framework. But my goal was to use it as a learning framework to build a project well beyond a single file Python script. The project shows how to effectively use:
- Namespaces to manage Python modules and scope
- Classes and objects to model the application
- Installing and using third-party Python libraries
- Handling errors and exceptions
- Using SqlAlchemy to abstract the storing and retrieval of database data
- Authentication and authorization of users
- Web application form handling
If you’re interested in Python and want to take your skills to the next level, I check it out and see what you think.