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jakevdp/WhirlwindTourOfPython

★ 4,011 · Jupyter Notebook · CC0-1.0 · updated Jan 2024

The Jupyter Notebooks behind my OReilly report, "A Whirlwind Tour of Python"

Jupyter notebooks backing Jake VanderPlas's free O'Reilly report on Python, targeting developers who already know another language and want to get productive with Python quickly. It's a fast-paced reference, not a beginner tutorial — it assumes you understand what a loop is, just not Python's particular flavor of one. The companion to his Python Data Science Handbook.

The pacing is genuinely good for its audience: it skips hand-holding on programming fundamentals and goes straight to Python-specific semantics like variable binding, mutability, and iterator protocol. Coverage of generators and list comprehensions is clear and hits the idioms that trip up people coming from Java or C#. CC0 license means you can use it in any training or course material without asking. VanderPlas is credible — he wrote NumPy documentation and is the author of Altair, so the data science preview chapter isn't filler.

Written against Python 3.5 in 2016 and last meaningfully touched years ago — f-strings, walrus operator, structural pattern matching, and the entire modern type annotation story are absent. The repo is essentially frozen; issues are open but nothing is being merged. It stops right before the useful parts: 15 notebooks to cover language basics, then one half-page notebook waving at NumPy/Pandas/Matplotlib. Anyone who actually needs data science fluency has to immediately go elsewhere. The website tooling (Pelican, Fabric) is legacy and would take effort to rebuild if you wanted to fork and update it.

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