I get asked about good books for beginners. Here's an example:

"What Python books do you recommend for novices so they can learn from beginner to advanced?"

For me, this is nearly impossible to answer.

"Beginner" is often undefined. I have to turn this around and ask what you already …

It's hard to write shameless promotional material.

I already wrote the books, isn't that bold enough?

It isn't, though.

Packt’s Head of Product, Oli Huggins, said: “We believe in helping to serve and support the global developer community. By selling our eBooks and Videos for $5, we hope to …

See https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-the-smallest-positive-number-missing-from-an-unsorted-array/ This seems to be a popular coding interview problem.

The Python code shown on the site seems almost maliciously misleading.

The full problem is this:

You are given an unsorted array with both positive and negative elements. You have to find the smallest positive …

Working on a new book. Fun stuff. It's going to cover Python 3.9.

I'm adding the type hints material. And that means PEP 585. Which means type hints for generics can use the generic types. We can use list[int] instead of List[int] and avoid from typing import …

Yes, that's what the email said.

I was -- well -- shocked. Too shocked to be polite. Content Warning: much snark follows.

This is glorious.

There was this sort of awkward shoving match between typing and collections.abc. Both had generic type definitions and it was -- often -- unclear how to use them.

See PEP 585. Now they are all unified into a much happier family.

And. We wind up writing things like …

Working on revisions to a book. Fun stuff. See https://www.packtpub.com/product/python-3-object-oriented-programming/9781849511261 I may have the privilege of working with Dusty.

I've been using mypy for all my 2nd edition changes, but not in --strict mode.

I've decided to ramp things up, and switch to strict …

I am not patient. I have been dismissed as one who does not suffer fools gladly.

This is a bad attitude, and I absolutely suffer from it. No denials here. I'm aware it limits my ability to help the deeply confused.

My personal failing is not being patient enough to …

Check out https://www.pythonpodcast.com/steven-lott-learn-to-code-episode-283/. This was a fun conversation on Python and learning.

We didn't talk about my books in detail. Instead, we talked about learning and what it takes to get closer to mastery.

It's a thing I worry about. I suspect other writers worry about …

See https://opendatascience.com/removing-items-from-a-set-remove-pop-and-difference/

This puts the focus on a few important set operations.