As someone who loves learning to code, I found this to be a great guide. I learned a great deal and would recommend this book to anyone who is looking to improve their skills.

What I love about DK guides is that they are easy to follow along. The projects here are simple and fun. I actually used a couple of them in my middle-school tech class and my students enjoyed the process and the final creations.

I used this book with a few students in my maker-space. They were super excited about getting started, but stumbled over the things they didn't know. I loved the book, but there is a learning curve which my 3rd and 4th graders were hard pressed to master when I can't meet with them every day. One class period every week is not enough to make this a classroom purchase.

I do recommend it to teachers with more time than I have with my classes. It is well written and very colorful. My students loved it...but we just couldn't make it work in our environment.

This is an interesting book for someone who is already interested in programming, has maybe tried project kits before, and has a parent to assist them. It is difficult to balance explanations when there is a lot to know but this skirts that line of over/under explaining certain items. For instance, there is a lot written about how to run a program, but the differences between an integer and a float feels like it needs to be expanded. This is a great book for a technical child because the projects look fun, they just have to get past the explanations first.

I showed this to my husband who is in IT and he said they look like good projects for someone who is interested, he especially liked the password picker, but he also agreed that it looks dense with information before the projects which might discourage some children from picking it up. Overall, it seems like a great book for young readers who are already interested in learning about Python and for parents who can work with their child while going through it.

This is a great entry-point for children to learn Python, as well as providing the foundations and syntax to learn other programming languages. Over a dozen coding projects are included in this book, and as this is a DK title, everything is spectacularly illustrated. This is a great supplement for STEM education in schools, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to adult learners who want to get into coding. Highly recommended.

I found this book to be really good. It made learning about Python very easy. Great and simple instructions on how to program using Python.

This is an excellent book for children. As I teach a college class it helped me in learning Python ahead of a class that I am teaching in Introduction to programming.

For children it is a step by lesson on learning programming. Python is used for its simplicity. Fun projects are done with an eye to keeping children interested. If I had a young child who showed an interest in programming I would definitely have them look at this. Python is easily available for all systems and though they talk about a specific editor, any editor would work.

Recommend for anyone wanting to learn Python, even adults.

My 12 year old loves coding so when given the opportunity to review " Coding projects in python", I snagged the book. My 12 year old said she liked the book, but it was not her favorite coding book. I asked her if she learned anything new she said yes but some of it was confusing.

Great book with into on coding using Python. I don't know much about coding. So this was handy. It was easy to follow and use.

A review for adults looking for a book to teach themselves programming

Some reviewers, like me, received an electronic copy of this book free of charge for review via Netgalley. Some of the other reviewers posted positive reviews fairly quickly after the book became available. I concede it might be appropriate to make comments on, for example, the book's layout and user-friendliness based on an hour's examination, maybe less. However, I thought that a better, if less quick, review would result if I, a comparative programming novice, took this book in hand and tried to teach myself a little Python with it. This I did.

I made it to about page 80. In a few days, they will yank my free copy off of my Adobe Digital Editions app. I should have gone further, but life intervened. It is a sincere endorsement of this book that I (a practicing miser) am seriously considering paying good money for an electronic copy of this book. I recommend it for the admittedly small audience of people in my position, i.e., grumping middle-aged people who hear everybody talking about coding and are interested in educating themselves, independently and without assistance.

Python seems a good choice for self-education because, in an unscientific sampling, I found it to be the most-frequently-taught programming language at high school level or above, at this writing.

I also recommend it for parents of younger children who wish to maintain the fiction, in the eyes of their offspring, that they are really smart people. If elementary-school children are using books like this, you can get ahead of the curve by educating yourself before your child comes to you with an expression, first, of confusion about his or her homework, and then, second, of heart-breaking disappointment as they discover that you do not know everything. Soon enough, they will be teenagers who believe that you are the biggest idiot in the world, and the desire to delay the onset of this attitude as long as possible is, I believe, a reasonable goal.

The book is understandably geared toward a younger audience, with cheerfully colorful graphics and an emphasis (at least in the first 80 pages) on game-like applications. It is maybe too print-heavy for children who have only recently learned to read, but I think it is appropriate for all over 10 years old, maybe younger. However, it is not childish book, and I feel a programming novice of any age would feel comfortable with, and understand the utility of, the projects in the book.

The book explains how to download Python for free, as well as IDLE, a Python programming environment. Anyone who uses online banking or Google Docs should have sufficient skills to do this.

When you sign up to get free books via NetGalley, publishers sometimes plead with you not to moan about proofreading or typographical errors that appear in the your advance egalley copy, as (publishers assure) the errors will be found and removed in the final version. In the case of the latest potboiling novel, it is no big deal if an occasional typo slips through, but in the case of this book, a misplaced punctuation mark in the code may result in a long period of puzzled head-scratching as the resulting code stubbornly resists your efforts to make it run. In case errors make it into the final version, I would like to point out the following that occurred in my advance copy:

– page 19: the second close parenthesis should be deleted in the following line of code:

if (counter % 2) == 0):

– page 30: in the following line of code

>>> height = 1.5

the writers (presumably non-Americans) failed to convert this metric value into Imperial units (in this case, inches) to match the other values in this example.

– page 56: (This one perhaps is not a publisher error, maybe it's my incompetence:)

The “while True:” statement, as placed in the book's example on this page, did not work for me. As written, the code works only the first time you request a new password generated, and fails if you ask for any further passwords. I fixed the problem by moving the “while True:” statement up between “import string” and the list of adjectives. The list of adjectives and nouns then had to be indented for the code to run correctly.

– page 67: here, and elsewhere, it was not clear how much the code needed to be indented in order to run correctly. This led me to learn that indentation seemed more significant in Python than in other codes I've fooled around with. I mean to say: in Python, failing to indent properly will result in non-running code, even if all other aspects of the code are correct. I thought that this should have been explained with examples earlier in the book, but it's true that I learned it well, because I taught it to myself.

Thanks to DK Publishing and Netgalley for the opportunity to explore this book.

I received this e-book ARC through Net Galley from DK Publishing in exchange for a truthful review.

Very modern, colorful, eye-catching "game-y" cover sets the tone of this juvenile non-fiction title.
In fact, the book is visually engaging through out, just what one would expect from a DK title geared towards kids.
Authors' avatars are listed along with their short bios.
Love that there are both female and male authors of this book.

Ideas are reinforced through cute graphics and interesting sidebars.
Chapters 1 and 2 teach the basics of getting starting with Python 3 and programming in general. The remaining chapters are full of interesting projects to tackle to learn universal programming concepts.

While the basics are taught in a useful progression (i.e. variables, statements, decision making, loops, functions, modules, graphics) I wish a forward reference to the more substantial Function section in Chapter 2 was mentioned when introducing the check_guess() function in the Animal Quiz section, which comes before the Function discussion takes place.

I gave this book 4.5 stars out of 5 because I found a few errata in the examples embedded in the chapters, which is a bit irksome for a book where people might be put off/discouraged if their program doesn't work after copying an example from the book.

Geared towards age 10+, an excellent resource for both children and adults interested in learning Python 3 and programming concepts.

This is a great book to learn how to code using Python. There are so many different books out on the market that teaches you how to use Python but I think this book is easy to use, easy to learn from, and easy to execute what you've learn to create some neat projects.

Python is something that a lot of my coworkers would talk about coding in but one that I had little experience in. When I saw there was a book to review that would teach me some basic coding in python I opted to check it out to see if it could give me a crash course that I could use as the foundation to build upon to learn more. I love the way this book was laid out with pictures and icons and images throughout as well as text, making it seem a lot more fun and a lot less like some of the boring how-to books I have read in the past. If you have coded before, some of the earlier chapters may just be a refresher for you, but if you've never coded before I think that they provide a really nice basic overview to coding. I just quickly went through this book in order to review it, but this is a book that I can see myself going back to reference and trying out the code in it until I end up catching on the the syntax and everything with python and how it works.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

This is a good book. It gives those interested more details to help them decide what "language" they would like to use. It provides good details in a clear way. It also provides some fun games to play. I recommend this book and want others to know it is helpful.

A well-illustrated how to book for anyone who needs an introduction in Python. Begins with very basic concepts and builds from there. I received a digital copy from the publisher via Netgalley. Not the best format to learn from. I image the paperback would be more beneficial.

Great book for a child wanting to learn to code software. Python is used in robotics and some biological and business research to manipulate data. This is a skill once learned that can be applied to many other projects and software languages. The illustrations are top notch, and it would make a great gift.

A new how-to from DK Publishing mostly aimed at the younger audience (10+) but perfectly usable for anyone who needs a good introduction to syntax and programming in Python.
DK are experts at well illustrated how-to books and this one is no exception.

Fairly hefty at 224 pages, this is a thorough introduction to Python. The examples are very well laid out with multiple real-life illustrations and screenshots. The graphics are lively and colorful and so much more interesting than the average doorstop sized coma-inducing boring snoozefest. This book is quite fun to read. Syntax and code are introduced gradually and build on earlier content. One thing I really liked about this book is that instead of just telling the reader what to do, it explains clearly why to do things and what effects result from which logical statements.

This book presupposes nothing. It begins introducing very basic concepts (what is a computer language, why program, what bugs are) and moves on to how to install (and that younger users should get permission before installing anything on their platform).

The book is full of sidebars with tips and tricks and pitfalls to avoid as well as good debugging information to minimize frustration.

The post-installation parts introduce the shell and working with test code and the difference between the shell and editor. The second chapter moves on to talk about flowcharts and writing a simple program. Each chapter also introduces terms and concepts used in the programming exercises for that chapter; for example, variables, lists, and strings are introduced defined and used in chapter 2.

Chapter 3 introduces graphics and provides several fun exercises for programming graphics.
At the end of each chapter, the material is reviewed with additional 'Hacks and Tweaks' allowing further experimentation and improvement. There's a graphic robot builder and a kaleidoscope spirograph type exercise among others.

Chapter 4 moves to app writing and self contained programming for different devices and platforms. As with the rest of the book, all of the different exercises are completely illustrated and supported with accessible, easily understood text and pictures.

Chapter 5 continues to build on the previous content with more complex games such as Snap! and concentration matching games. As always there are sidebars with tips and a section for tweaking and improving the programs.

There is a reference chapter at the end which is accessible and usable. Code references for all of the projects in the book are included here along with a very useful indexed glossary.

Perfectly useful and not oversimplified or patronizing. I learned a lot from this book and can heartily recommend it to Python newbies to more advanced beginners, whatever their age.

Five stars.

Great book for adults or teens that are beginning coding. It is easy to use and allow the reader to work at their own pace without too much trouble.

Over the summer, I've been looking for books and sites to create projects and competitions/challenges for students in my programming course and the school's coding club. Though some of the projects and the book's design might be tailored more to middle school students, this will be a resource I use for both the club and the course. I think it is great to give real, clear uses of the programming language as soon and as often as possible.

I've read a variety of coding books and websites of varying quality. This is a particularly good one. Coding books for children have a tendency to be simplified, often to the point that they are hardly useful. DK, though, has provided young readers with an in depth introduction. Explanations are clear. Loads of examples of the various coding principles. Even more importantly, the examples are more than just code. We're given concrete, applicable uses for these principles, how to use them for creating, say, a game. It's this direct application, not for a particular project (as web guides tend to have) but for a type of project. This is an excellent choice for any kid or adult looking to get started in Python.