Hello and welcome to teaching python with Kelly and Sean python books for teachers in our library books. Do we find the most valuable and useful and another intended purpose for each one? So today we're going to go through our top books with before we start that Kelly since we're going to go reading themed for her podcast this week. What kind of reading do you like to do when you're not reading python books about learning? I do a lot of
Non-fiction books one of the ones for example and reading is learned better and it's just about the science of how do we learn better versus just memorizing and is based on the facts of taking it a lot of the skills and how we apply critical thinking so even though not reading about python at kind of helps me to learn more about python get directions. So most of my reading when it comes to Python and learning and teaching is really done online. So I'm more of a Blog reader. I like to watch videos. I like to see other people teaching and learn from that. So for me when I'm not reading python books, I'm reading usually for pleasure some reading science fiction or historical fiction. I love reading fiction books. So for me if I'm not reading something about how to invent your own games in Python.
I am usually reading something for fun books at the moment. I just finished reading Dan Simmons Hyperion book. Actually, I read in demion which is later in the series, but it's one of my favorite all-time classic books and I just wrapped it up and it was really a lot of fun to get back into it.
 Switching to a python books. We've actually been ordering a lot of books. I think we came in with the mindset of just more books nail Builder own class sets are Library not only for us but you know for any kids that might want to pick it up and I know you're going to go through a little bit of the higher-level Python books.
 As your expert in coding and I'm going to go with the ones that I tend to draw towards. So once you start off with one of your first ones that you are your own computer games with python by all Swagger and you're going to hear his name a few times cuz he's a fairly prolific and well known in the python community. So this is a book that's intended for beginners. It's published by no starch press add. It introduces you to python through the window of gaming every exercise in the book. Every chapter is organized around introducing a new topic in Python and comes with an Associated game to be played with it. So as I'm flipping through this book, there's things like a guessing game where you have to guess a number between 1 and 20, but as you're going through that exercise,
 Mr. Swaggart introduces you to the idea of breaking down your code into multiple parts and how to structure the program flow and use comparison operators and conditional statements. So it's a great way for the reader to code a project and make it interesting for them through the mechanism of gaming but also to learn some really important programming Concepts along the way and as you get further and further into the into the book you get much more complex in terms of the types of of work that you do so you learn how to make your own functions you get into lists and dictionaries how to design algorithms and some of them are even recursive with them by the time you get to the end. He also introduces High game as part of this so you can start to make your own graphics and respond to use her van. So it gets pretty sophisticated for a beginner book. But what I really like is that the learning curve for this is a really nice progression. It makes sense all the way through and I've been able to hand this book to sue
 How to say here's a go look at chapter 4 if you want to learn about this concept or gold, you know, look at this section, if you want to learn how to do list in an interesting way and they're the random number program correctly explains. It is before you write code. So there's a lot of pseudocode in there. There's a lot of flowcharts and so it really gives both teachers and students a lot to work with in terms of How to Think Through the problems as you're as you're going through and solving them as a newbie to code when I first looked at Swaggart's books. I kind of got scared and I backed away and this is a person that I know I hadn't even study python code. I just wanted to pick it up and we ordered a book called coding projects in Python, and I don't know probably has a lot to do with it has color and pictures and it's by numerous amount of authors. I think they
 Did a group both in the UK and in India, but as you flip through the the book really just starts at the beginning of starting with python The Fonz big it's more like a kid book and I think it sounds kind of silly. But if you do not know how to code if you don't even know where to start the best place to start is where kid would start I think and what help them with this is I need to find a lot of the words it showed Snippets of code. And as long as you both through the code and the functions, it would explain it with arrows and everything. So I like that and I did do a couple of these Elsa has Turtle which I like to use and it also has games and you can add onto a user-friendly prompts and it teaches about flowcharts. I did a couple of these at the beginning
 It just helped me to understand as I was going through the Tinker exercises as well this summer more about Python and love it all.
 Yeah, that's that is a great book. And as you're flipping through a some of the things that it has it has the ability to create your own graphics with turbo lets you go through different shapes and construction. But even though it's a brightly colored book and it breaks things down into really fun discrete chunks. I think is really helpful for attention span and learning. It's not dumb things down at all. It has a very sophisticated flow to it, especially for beginners and it done a really nice job of making it very accessible making it fun making it colorful. So people who who are more visual Learners and like seeing how things connect together in a visual way. It's not just the fact that has pictures. It's also the fact that it has lots of call outs and diagrams and notations on it so that as you are looking at the page and parsing through the information, it's really easy to chunk it into pieces that are easy to understand and quickly grok.
 And some of the slides at the beginning just the idea of the difference between an integer and a float. I like the variable and they jump right in and the variables on your page 24, so they definitely do not hold anything back so that out. But coding projects in Python. We found out on Amazon and I think it's you know, 20 bucks or $24. It's is not an expensive book but is another great beginners book and is really well suited. If you're a visual learner yourself if you like things to be organized and and arranged in a way that you can jump from piece to piece it works really well for that where I am at your own computer games with python the book we just talked about also great beginners book, but more linearly organized the next book that I have is python for kids by Jason Briggs. It's fun for kids a playful introduction to programming and this is a really fun book as well. The examples in here are really colorful. So it gives you the ability to to tell a story along the way with
 And I think that that works really well for soon as they're learning this so it goes through has things like a joke generators and conditions programming puzzled. This one is really strong for the examples that it gives and then it also comes back through the same top external Graphics how to access files from the file system converting dates Stars. So there's a lot of good reference in here. So if you have a student or you yourself for trying to learn a small piece of python it maybe haven't touched before this is a great reference book because it connects a lot of different concepts together with really good examples that make it fun and easy to understand I do you progressed into the other books later on but this one's learn computational and algorithmic thinking
 I like this book because in my previous years of teaching a Robotics and other aspects in technology, we always turn to computational thinking so I like how this book goes through the process of what happening in the code. And I also liked it at the the first 11 chapters. It goes through all the the major topics that we cover in the 9 weeks. It goes into inputs and outputs. It goes into Boolean Expressions, it goes into Strings and how you're going to manipulate them and you're in writing your first rule programs in like the first couple of chapters and at what I also like about this is it has a quiz feature.
 One of the books from learn better it always tells you to constantly reflecting quiz yourself and in order for the information to stick and so if you take a few minutes as you're going too long to just stop and think about what you just read and quiz yourself at tens to stick a little bit better is good because it's physically a large book feels really satisfying to spread that one out and be able to go through the projects that it has an inside the book examples on that one a really good as well that I noticed with most of these books we talked about so far is that they tend to cover a lot of the same ground but they do it in different ways with different types of examples, so it's been useful for us as we're putting together lesson plans and challenges and self-paced learning activities are projects was the ability to Taylor some of those examples to the students that we have so we can choose when it's more game oriented or one that's more English.
 Storytelling with a narrative to it so that we could focus the examples on the type of student in the type of learner that we're engaging with. We can provide more examples. I like combining the examples on daily challenges. So I'll have one day on a certain function or and then I'll do another problem. I'll program the next day. My next book is beginner book for grown-ups. This is a classic book. It's automate the boring stuff with python by Al Swaggart. And so if you're teaching older students high school college graduate students, this is a fantastic way to really get those students going because this book is more serious examples and
 I seem more serious. They're still incredibly useful and really helpful to go through. For example, this will let you learn how to create your own web scraper. So you can scrape data off the internet for analysis. You can work with PDF files. You can make updates to Excel files. You can send out emails online right or automated emails using this. So this is a really great book for just kind of getting stuff done. So if you have like older Learners who may be are looking for more Purpose Driven lining or if they have something they need to learn for the sake of sending out an email or updating an email an Excel spreadsheet automate the boring stuff with python is one of the more advanced books in terms of the types of examples, but it still starts in the very beginning stages of python. Sorry to interrupt. You know what I love about these all these books and this is something that we do tend to turn to you whenever a student comes to us and has a question, you know that are normally our first
 Tickets go to Google but because we we've gone through a lot of these books will we know which one to grab and say? Oh, I think there's a book in here that you can we can give you to help out. What is really good because it's that act of having the screen open to your code and be able to go back and forth between the book and a and the code is really helpful for students to stay focused and on track they tend to be less distracted when they're not flipping between two different tabs in a browser something satisfying about finding a program in the book and I think the idea of reading the code on a hard copy and having to physically typing in all so it does wonders for the learning. I find that when the kids go in and copy the code online. I don't think they really dissect that coat is much. So for me. Yes, this is something satisfying about using a book. I'm in order to write the code out. So boring stuff with python by Al Swagger again available on Amazon and Atlas prices 2995.
 So I have to give a shout out to the micro, but that was my go-to. When we first started. There's something satisfying about being able to load a piece of code into a device and seen it light up or seen an image or pressing a button that first moment when the kids, you know can do that. And so the program in the BBC micro bit getting started with micropython by Simon monk was one of the ones that I used to go to the basics of micropython give you the basic codes a hello world and it just walks you through all the way down to the touch.
 Sensors on the bottom at tacos close to the accelerometer shows you how to connect Electronics to it. So I think this little book I mean in its ass nice little book that you can throw in your backpack and take it with you but it goes into a lot of things it even goes into Strings and list and just has a nice little reference in the back and I found it very useful and they also will show you a little bit of the block code in there as well. So I found it something to use what's funny about it is it's its flipped like most books start you off with the block Editor to start weather. That's the edger blocks or Microsoft makecode this actually starts with micropython in the beginning and you don't actually get to see the make code in her face until it chapter twelve. So they've really done a great job of focusing on the micropython aspects of the micro bit and think we mention this before but one thing we really like about this approach of learning using a micro.
 Is it you're starting with a much smaller library and the outcomes the output of your code is much more can J-1 Hands-On. They can see the students can see the lights turning on off on and off. They can see the responses to button presses and you're losing control structures at the beginning are fairly simple a while true Loop for most of the beginning beginning exercises that you need to cover to the the breadboard which is one of the things that we also do an R and R & R classes. So it's a great book easy. And it said one of my cops just got published this fall. It's called impractical python projects playful programming programming activities to make you smarter than a mouthful. It's by Levon and it just came out a few months ago. This is my favorite second book. So after you do automate the boring stuff with python or invent your own computer games. This is the great next book.
 To go to the reason why is it starts off with an assumption that you already know some basic python that you completed one of those books already but it jumps right into some really great exercise examples including the one that I just did was calculating anagrams calculating how how many there are in a dictionary it lets you go through some some multi word anagrams as well. So those
 exercises while they're fairly simple and amp all things like string slicing and and things that are relatively simple concepts for the beginning part of your second course what I really like about it is that the author takes the time to introduce some good programming practices as well. So the first version of the anagram solver actually doesn't run that. Well, it's not very efficient. It's fairly slow. It takes like 3 to 5 minutes to solve all the anagrams in a 60000 word dictionary, but then he shows you how to measure that with C profiler and see where the different function calls are coming from and help to understand where there are opportunities to optimize your code and then introduces you to the set data structure which has a much faster index hash table for accessing words with in a dictionary. So it gives you the opportunity as a programmer to learn a new way to optimize your programs and take your code to a
 Better place through an iterative approach. So it's a really great accessible way in each chapter. So far has included one of these new programming best practices does not necessarily related to the example or the data structure that they're trying to introduce what helps you become a better Kotor and helps you to think more iterative lie about your coding design and how to be a better overall. Overall. This is how I learned to use Python lenters was through this book to make sure that my coat is well formatted and I understand that I am writing it in a in a very readable way but this book is great and I'm going right now. It's It's been traveling back and forth between home and school with me so I can work on a programmer an exercise in between other task book out there. Maybe my book that I just got it and I I got it because I love his his list that come to me an email. I get a coffee break every single day is Christian.
 Facebook coffee-break python 50 workouts to kick-start your learning. I really am getting into our I'm sorry. It's kick-start your rapid coat understanding and python as a very long title.
 But I I love it the coffee break python. Anyways, when I'm going into this book what I really like about Christians setup. Is he believes in the in the power of 10 to 20 minutes, you know, do you learn every single grab a coffee sit down program for 10 to 20 minutes try to do it try to solve problems without coding it try to do think about the code before you put it into email or are your other software editor? Sorry. I'm having a bunch of workouts to get you thinking and the other thing I like about it is all his little cheat sheets and even has a cheat sheet out there for data science has a cheat sheet for list. So anything where you can just flip through the cheat sheet and find those functions and be able to ride him up quicker. And that was one of the things that I was always having trouble to recall and the other thing I like about
 Chris Ramirez he responds to your to your emails right away. Really interesting guy. I asked him a question how you keep all these vocabulary words and he says you remember when you need them, which is good advice crap. So don't worry about memorizing all the words. And if you can't call it the right thing. Don't worry, you can always use a Chi Chi you should over a number of those coffee break over to me to test my knowledge and see if I can get it as well and it's been fun because it's a thing that we can share if you have a teaching partner or if you have students that are really into it and I engaged if you're all subscribe to it gives you that kind of water cooler moment where you can ask. Hey, did you see the coffee break and how does it work? And did you figure out the answer and it gives you something daily that you can compare notes and I think that has a lot of power to it and he'll actually extend on that. So once we do the challenges we reply back or if we try to take on the challenge and we sending our solution and then we can have a conversation with the rest of the community.
 That comes in a lot with python, I think of all that that Community feeling where you have someone to talk to and eat day. He doesn't really care that you just started learning python. So I thought that was pretty cool. It's a really great book. I'm glad to see it come out and it just came out a couple months ago. So it's really good to see, the freshness of all the new books that are coming out in Python in a lot of new ways of approaching learning the language and also learning the ways of thinking through the problems.
 The next time I have is kind of a special mention it's a book from a meat sauce called doing math with python. So use programming to explore algebra statistics calculus and more and this is this is a great book. One of the things that I did when I first start learning python was going out to the project Euler website project Euler. Net Euler the famous mathematician and they have a number of math challenges that you can solve that work. Well via code that you can solve them on paper. If you're better mathematicians I am you should be able to do that as a programmer. Are there great ways to think about how to solve problems and how to solve it a python weigh. So this book I really like because one of the things that we constantly do is work with other teachers on how to integrate technology into their curriculum and find different ways to
 Help students learn and so one of the books that I grab to be able to do that was this doing math with python book and I really like it because it is heavily focused on math. It covers a lot of the end the numpy library a lot with Matt pot live at talks about listen to bulls and formulas. It covers sets and probability statistics symbolic-math, which was really interesting to see calculus problems and using Sim pie. So there's a just a wealth of information in here and I use this more as a reference material. So if I'm working with a math teacher and we're trying to think about a way to explain a concept I'll grab this and see if there is an example in here that we can write in code that we can step our students through to talk about how high can help them understand math better. So it is been a great book. It's a little bit a little bit Slimmer than some of the other books do we have which is nice. It's it but I would say it's a little more dense. This is more of a
 Turn book for for math. It's really for focus on math and statistics and probability. There's not a lot left in here. It's straight to the point and I really like that and this book is set up a similar to the way that Christian Mayer sets up his coffee break and python. He has short chapters the whole philosophy has 10 minutes. I always say it's it's learning a language in the more. I read all the books. I say the same thing. It's just like learning a foreign language you need to practice every day. And so the philosophy of this book is 10 minutes learn about dictionaries 10 minutes learn about the list and how to slice them. It's really quick. The chapters are literally maximum two pages long. So the idea is to read it try a couple of the lines of code and and then move on try something new or going to take a step back and just think about what you've done and it's really interesting the way that they go through the book Marcos to this book. He goes through with very low.
 Sunny goes into Texans strains can all the way to the end the book. He does the wild lips which was something interesting when I was just flipping through he put that in the end where we've actually teach while loop at the very first the very first things with a Hello print you can go ahead and loop it in contention city is not a smarter way to Learn Python and makes me laugh because he says he's even code so grandmothers in cab drivers. So if they can do it anyone can do that right now to go with all these is if you have a need to pick up a book and learn how to code a new language. There should be something out there that works for you. So we've been doing a lot of reading. These are our favorite this here and wanting to be loved by the community is that there are new books coming out all the time. We're going to put links to each of these books in the show notes. So if you want to learn more about them, feel free to to Quick through those links take a look at
 What's their wish I can have them up just as full disclosure as Amazon affiliate links to support the podcast but really these are just our personal recommendations for good books about Python and hopefully you can find some of them useful whether you're wanting to learn something new or whether you need to teach something new. These are our favorite books the books. What have you learned this week that you really felt interesting about python thanks to your recommendation. I took a panda's Hands-On course from kygo. Calm and it was short Hands-On exercises. I'll put the link to the course in the show notes as well. But this was a really great Deep dive into ice a deep dive but it really was a tour through all the different features of pandas and it's done on kaggle using something very similar to a jupyter notebook. So each course has instructions and exercise.
 Places inside the notebook that you can then run and commit your changes when you're finished. So I went through I think if there's five sections I went through all of them in about 5 or 6 hours and it was a really good engaging a set of exercises and I had a motive in mind. And the reason I wanted to warn pandas was to get to a point where I could analyze some accelerometer data that we had from our model rocket unit in re3 physics class by the time I've finished the course, I was able to find the data that I was looking for in our data set isolated and graph it and I was jumping up and down in my house when I was finally able to pull that off right angle. I really like that. I was looking at data science and I was trying to find ways to manipulate Big Data within the classrooms with in science class for math class and i k
 Kostas to the Itsy corset I'm taking and I just really like this platform. The whole idea of this website is too pretty much it's a news feed where you can personalize and search through all the things that you like and there's competitions and there's places where you can go and learn like the link I sent you and just discussion areas. I was doing a search on weather trying to help out with the weather lesson that we were going to look at and it just has all this data that you can you can get to and source and I think it's the sky's the limit. So if you're really into data science, if you're into machine learning anything aai, this is the website to kind of go into cuz they've aggregated it all nicely distinctive about the so they really liked they're not just providing data sets direct actively curating those datasets. So as dit new data is added to them they're making sure that the data quality say
 Free hi there curating and Colin old data that's out of date or inaccurate. So you have access to just huge amounts of data through the kygo platform. And then they also combine those Jupiter style notebooks into it so that you can run all of your own analysis right there on the table site. So it's pretty impressive what you can do with kygo and they have in addition to the data sites in the the notebooks. They also have a learning section which is where I found that data science course that you sent me they have within that a 7-Day Python Challenge so you can learn python in theory in 7 days, which I thought was really interesting. I haven't gone through the course yet, but this might be a good place to to access some free learning order to be able to refer students to learn some new information is going to be a good place to start to just kids to look at data from other sources. Just looking at energy consumption right now. I'm looking at how it changes over.
 I'm over the years and then there's actually public the demesne of all day electricity and where the light company and the electric comes from. So I just think that if you can get this data out two kids and start talking to them about what they seem able to be curious of how they can curate it like you were doing with your with your Panda and your your rocket and acceleration able to gather insights from data. That's really the goal of our units that when we talked about data science is to help our students become more literate with data and I'm really excited about the possibilities with Kegel for doing that from 2008 to 2016 who knew the books that were through our library today. We're excited to see what's next on our bookshelf. We have many other books as well. We want to give you some highlights of our favorites for the new year. So if you're looking for
 Something to spend your holiday gift card on or some winter reading while you're at maybe on break from your teaching Diaries book this month and let us know what you think. You can reach us at teaching python or R through our website at www. Teaching python. FM. Good. Bye.