The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally
Original price was: €22.€14Current price is: €14.
Price: $21.87 - $14.41
(as of Sep 27, 2025 00:11:28 UTC – Details)
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?
Publisher : Self-Taught Media
Publication date : January 24, 2017
Language : English
Print length : 299 pages
ISBN-10 : 0999685902
ISBN-13 : 978-0999685907
Item Weight : 1.14 pounds
Dimensions : 7.5 x 0.68 x 9.25 inches
Part of series : Very Short Introductions
Best Sellers Rank: #516,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #38 in Python Programming #328 in Microsoft Programming (Books) #471 in Introductory & Beginning Programming
Customer Reviews: 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,092 ratings var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });
Customers say
Customers find this programming book effective and easy to follow, particularly for beginners learning Python. The content is well-explained, with one customer highlighting the lucid explanation of OOP concepts, and another noting it’s written in a manner perfect for self-instruction. They appreciate how the book guides novices to develop expertise, and one customer mentions it helps fill in knowledge gaps.
9 reviews for The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally
Add a review
Related Products
Original price was: €22.€14Current price is: €14.
Lloyd Garrick –
6 stars!
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!
powder –
It’s a great book for any new python programmer
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.
M. Fraley –
Needs to be updated
Good book. Moves a little fast at the beginning hosing you with vocabulary and concepts but thereâs probably only so much that can be done with that. The book hasnât been updated recently however, which is more problematic in my mind. There are minor differences in the examples given and what the most recent version of Python will do. So far nothing major but given how rapidly the coding world evolves, it surprised me that the author is letting it slowly fall into obsolescence.EDIT: The more I move through the book, the more irritated I get by the occasional sloppy formatting, because you have to spend time deciphering if certain punctuation is part of the code example or added simply for grammatical purposes. Difficult to explain here but IYKYK.Also, I’m finding that the author sometimes seems to cheat on practice exercises. He’ll give a prompt for you to accomplish some task (presumably answerable from the information provided in the chapter). You’ll work for ages on a solution, and in giving up and looking for how he solved it, he’ll use some end-run solution using other means.For example, in Chapter 6, he’ll say “take the list [“the”, “fox”, “jumped”, “over”, “the”, “fence”, “.”] and turn it into a grammatically correct string with spaces between all the words but no space between the word ‘fox’ and the period.”Great, alright…[work for 20 minutes]. Go to the solution, and the dude prints all the words up through “fence”, and just drops the period, and then tacks it back on at the end. That’s not turning the list into a sentence like the prompt said, it’s just chopping parts out of it and then re-adding elements back in to technically get the same result. Very aggravating.Here is his solution to the exercise above (from Ch. 6-it’s Python). The sleight of hand happens at line 3:1. fox = [“The”, “fox”, “jumped”, “over”, “the”, “fence”, “.”]2. fox = ” “.join(fox)3. fox = fox[0: -2] + “.”4. print(fox)He does that kind of thing more than occasionally. Now it could be that I’m being unreasonable in what I’m expecting. Maybe there is a more direct way to do that, and it’s just too early on to have learned that. Maybe he’s trying to encourage creative problem solving. But I don’t want to learn how to code with duct tape that *technically* functions but is trash code, I want to learn how to code.[/rant/
Amazon Customer –
This book is so good, I asked for more
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!
spaceclav –
This is a good guide book for python programming. It’s easy to read. So reading this book might be your first step for becoming a professional programmer. However, the title is more attractive than the contents. 😛
Kullanmaya baÅlayınca faydasını gördüm –
Kötü
Bohne –
Normally I don’t give 1-Star, but this book here is totally nonsense in regards of its title. What is covered here are the basics for python and the absolute basics for bash control (like seriouly absolute basics and nothing more). You kind of expect an in depth explanation of design patterns used in the industry, standards to strive for etc. but nothing of this is in this book but only a bunch of tutorials you can easily find on the internet and for sure this book is not worth, what it costs. In regards I will send it back because I don’t want to support this kind of “Book-Clickbaiting”.Sincerely, not a hater.
Chris Paggen –
Tres bonne approche a la programmation. J’ai achete ce livre pour mon ado (15 ans) qui s’interesse au sujet. Le bouquin est facile a suivre pour un passionne. Ca ne regorge pas d’algorithmes, de theorie et de maths – c’est direct dans l’action via un max d’essais pratiques.Mon ado a installe Python par lui-meme apres avoir commence ce livre et me pose des questions sur les exercices. Mission accomplie!
Saidalavi kt –
Good