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The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally Paperback – January 24, 2017

by Cory Althoff (Author)

4.5 1,984 ratings

Part of: Very Short Introductions (247 books)

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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?

Part of series

Very Short Introductions
Length

299
Pages
Language

EN
English
Publication date

2017
January 24
Dimensions

7.5 x 0.7 x 9.3
inches
ISBN-10

0999685902
ISBN-13

978-0999685907
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Popular Highlights in this book

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To improve your programming skills, you should practice programming every day.
Highlighted by 1,336 Kindle readers
A string is a sequence of one or more characters surrounded by quotes.
Highlighted by 1,141 Kindle readers
Variable names can only contain letters, numbers, and the underscore symbol.
Highlighted by 1,033 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I always keep a few copies of The Self-Taught Programmer around to give to anyone that comes to me for career advice."--Robin Abrams, Board Member, HCL Technologies, FactSet Research, Lattice Semiconductor and Sierra Wireless
"Want to learn to program professionally? Follow Cory's advice."-- David Phillips, Co-Founder, Hackbright Academy
"I am incredibly impressed with this book." --JoAnn Buchanan, Senior Research Associate, Allen Institute for Brain Science
"Learning to program is increasingly important in finance. Althoff's book taught me the skills I need to stay competitive." --Derek Schaefer, Senior Finance Manager, Charles Schwab
"The Self-Taught Programmer was a pleasure to read--something I never thought I would say about a technical book."--Melinda Sacks, Former Writer, Editor, San Jose Mercury News
"One of the best Software Design books of all time" -- BookAuthority

From the Author

I spent one year writing The Self-Taught Programmer. It was an exciting and rewarding experience. I treated my book like a software project. After I finished writing it, I created a program to pick out all of the code examples from the book and execute them in Python to make sure all 300+ examples worked properly. Then I wrote software to add line numbers and color to every code example. Finally, I had a group of 200 new programmers "beta read" the book to identify poorly explained concepts and look for any errors my program missed. One last note: this book was written for new programmers. If you are an advanced programmer, this is probably not the best book for you.
I hope you learn as much reading my book as I did writing it. Best of luck with your programming!

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Self-Taught Media (January 24, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 299 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0999685902
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0999685907
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.68 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #31,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in Microsoft Programming (Books)
- #15 in Python Programming
- #16 in Introductory & Beginning Programming

Customer Reviews:
4.5 1,984 ratings

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Cory Althoff

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Cory Althoff is an executive and author whose work includes The Self-Taught Programmer and The Self-Taught Computer Scientist. After graduating from Clemson University with a major in political science, he taught himself to program, eventually becoming a software engineer at eBay. His books have been translated into eight languages, and he has been featured in publications like Forbes and CNBC. Cory is a senior vice president at CompTIA, the leading IT certification provider for the global technology industry and its workforce. Cory lives in California with his wife and daughters.

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4.5 out of 5

1,984 global ratings

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Lloyd Garrick

6 stars!

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2017

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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!

5 people found this helpful

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nathan last

Greate book!

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2023

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Well written book, suitable for all ages. Explaining the basic from scratch, and opening many doors for further learning. I really enjoyed it, and recommend it for everyone looking for learning python and programming basics.

One person found this helpful

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M. Fraley

Needs to be updated

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

Good book. Moves a little fast at the beginning hosing you with vocabulary and concepts but there’s probably only so much that can be done with that. The book hasn’t 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/

53 people found this helpful

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powder

It's a great book for any new python programmer

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

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.

5 people found this helpful

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Armando Leon

Reviews for a friend Interested in programming career

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2021

Verified Purchase

I wish I read this book when I started my career. I too felt the pains the author felt when he started his career. I have a friend wanting to start a career in programming. I wanted to read it before I recommend it to him. I think this book perfectly compartemalizes what you should look at or things to learn right after you learn to code. If you're a engineer beginning your career , this book will help. If you're a year or 2 in for your career, this book contains info you've already picked up. I won't discredit it because of that. In my book it's a 5 star-rating because the author accomplished the goal he set, with the intended audience he had in mind.

3 people found this helpful

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Yoosuf

Great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 26, 2021

Verified Purchase

Definitely a good book to read if you’re a programmer, even better book to read if you’re a computing student. Would recommend 👌🏽

Stefano Diciotti

Fantastico

Reviewed in Italy on January 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

Libro dalla struttura molto semplice che va "dritto al punto". Ottimo per avere un'idea delle varie possibilità a disposizione quando si impara un nuovo linguaggio di programmazione come Python (con qualche accenno a Bash e controllo versione). Consigliato a chi è alle primissime armi, ma anche a chi conosce ed utilizza già questi strumenti ma necessita di "riordinare le idee".

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Person

good overal guide for self taught

Reviewed in Canada on July 7, 2023

Verified Purchase

Good book, it was both wide spanning and definite on several topics within Comp Sci. A definate must read for those working towards jobs in the field without degrees.

Catherine

Impressive book for beginners.

Reviewed in Australia on June 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

Been through about half of the book. So far, it's been very helpful for me. I would strongly recommend the book for any beginners who struggle with programming language and syntax and concepts etc. The author did a great job in explaining Python language and its contents in plain, simple English . Challenges at the end of chapters for you to practice and remember the codes better. I found that I could understand the concepts behind the codes and remember them better than from most other online free courses. I can actually learn more and learn better than the Python course I am currently taking. Love it!

Adnan

Book looks old

Reviewed in India on June 8, 2023

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The media could not be loaded.

The paper quality was average, the binding was good, but the main issue is the book looked old and the pages were slightly yellowish.

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