Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm an electrical engineer who programs a lot both at my job and at home. My non-programmer sister wants to learn how to code and I was interested in learning Python both for work and hobbies, so I picked this up to teach myself and evaluate as a gift for her. Needless to say, I'm pretty satisfied with it and I expect that my sister will be too. Python is a fantastic language for beginning programmers and Sweigart does a great job of explaining it. The only beef I had with it is that some of the humor in the book may interfere with comprehension. Humor is great to keep readers engaged and help prevent them from stressing out about stuff that can be intimidating, but there are a few times here where I felt the quality of explanation suffered a little to squeeze in a joke or geek-culture reference. Note that my complaint is minor enough to not warrant taking a star off of the rating. The book's focus on automation in the second half is fantastic. Most other programming books that I have used are no where near as pragmatic and it's great to be able to apply your new knowledge to your own life immediately. I also recommend this book to anyone who has a boring job sitting in front of a computer all day. Learn to automate your tasks and do a month of work in a day.