Python Guides

Seventeen guides, each structured the same way: Learn for tutorials, Recipes for task-focused how-tos, Reference for lookups, and Concepts for short explanatory essays. Every tutorial's code cells can be edited and run directly on the page.

A recommended order

If you're working through Python for the first time, a sensible sequence is:

1. Conditional logic — how programs make decisions.
2. Data structures — lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets.
3. Collections — Counter, defaultdict, deque, and namedtuple from the standard library.
4. Functions — defining, calling, and composing.
5. Classes and objects — bundling state and behaviour.
6. String processing — working with text.
7. Numbers and maths — numeric types, floating point, Decimal, and the maths modules.
8. Dates and times — datetime, parsing, and time zones.
9. Type hints — annotations and static type-checking.
10. Iterators and generators — lazy pipelines and the iteration protocol.
11. File handling — reading and writing data.
12. Error handling — exceptions and failure modes.
13. Logging and debugging — making programs observable.
14. Regular expressions — pattern matching for text.
15. Unit testing — proving your code works.
16. Concurrency — threads, processes, and async/await for work that waits or computes.
17. Packages and packaging — modules, imports, virtual environments, and shipping your code.

If you're here for a specific topic, pick any guide and dive in — they're self-contained.