About Agilearn

Agilearn is a set of self-directed Python guides, published as a free, open resource.

Who it's for

The guides assume you have seen Python before — you recognise variables, strings, numbers, and basic control flow — but you are still new to writing Python that a working data scientist or developer would call "clean". If that sounds like you, start at any guide whose topic you're curious about; they're designed to be self-contained.

How the guides are organised

Each guide is structured into four sections.

Learn is the step-by-step path. Each item is a short Jupyter notebook you read through in order, running cells as you go. Start here if the topic is new to you.

Recipes are task-focused: "how do I write a recursive function?", "how do I avoid a common regex mistake?". Reach for these when you have a concrete job to do.

Reference is for lookups — the thing you skim when you need to remember a method signature or a flag. Short, information-dense, and not something you'd read cover-to-cover.

Concepts is the smallest but often the most interesting section. It holds short essays on why things work the way they do — why strings are immutable, why logging exists, why functions are first-class objects.

Running the code

Every notebook page runs Python directly in your browser. Each code cell has its own Run button — edit the code, hit run, and see the output on the page. The Python environment loads on first use and runs entirely client-side: no install, no signup, no server. Your edits stay on your own machine.

If you prefer to run locally, every notebook has a download button in the top-right corner; open the downloaded .ipynb in Jupyter or any editor with notebook support.

Licence and contributions

Content is released under the MIT License — the project name keeps the US spelling because that's how the licence is formally titled, but everywhere else we use the British "licence". The licence covers all guides on this site and the accompanying code.

The source lives on GitHub and contributions, corrections, and suggestions are welcome — there's an Edit this page link at the top of every page.