Q: "Can you recommend books that are good for a beginner wanting to learn python?"
Me: "Depends on the person’s background..."
Q: "They has a deep background in the problem domain. Recently they've been doing a lot of reporting and analytics using SQL."
Okay. That's excellent.
One of the best books is “automate the hard stuff with Python” by Al Sweigart. See https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
I’ve got a very small ebook on the exact topic of stepping away from SQL to embrace Python: See https://slott56.github.io/2024-08-20-unlearning_sql.html
And see https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2025/unlearning-sql.html for a video on moving from SQL to Python.
Finally, the killer toolset for this kind of thing is Jupyter Lab. See https://jupyter-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/24.1.0/jupyterlab/index.html