Stop writing Python that merely works. Start writing Python that holds up.
You already know the syntax. You can write a function, loop through a list, and define a class without stopping to think about it. And yet something still separates your code from the code you admire - the kind that is short, obvious, and still easy to change six months from now.
That gap is exactly what this book closes.
Python Intermediate Essentials is the first volume of the Python Intermediate in Practice series: ten books, fifteen exercises each, built as a progressive training program rather than a reference manual. Every exercise starts from a realistic problem, walks you through the design decisions before a single line of code is written, and ends with a challenge that forces you to apply what you just learned.
Inside, you'll work through:
- Advanced unpacking that turns messy records into named, readable values
- Sorting with explicit, reproducible criteria - including the tie-breakers most tutorials skip
- defaultdict, ChainMap, Counter, deque, and namedtuple, and when each one is genuinely the right tool
- Sets as a modeling language for permissions, overlaps, and exclusions
- Comprehensions that stay readable instead of collapsing into cryptic one-liners
- Guard clauses, conditional expressions, and the walrus operator used with judgment
- Structural pattern matching with match / case
- Enum, IntEnum, and StrEnum for states and constants that can't silently drift
- Dataclasses that validate, compute, and sort using frozen, order, field, and post_init
- Custom exceptions, chaining, and preserving the real context of an error
- Shallow versus deep copies, sentinel values, and who actually owns a mutable object
- A capstone project that combines all of it into a complete scoring and rules engine
No frameworks. No third-party packages. Just the Python standard library, your editor, and fifteen workshops that make you a more deliberate programmer.
Whether you're self-taught, changing careers, or a working developer who wants to tighten the fundamentals, this series meets you where you are and raises the bar one exercise at a time.
Pick up Book 1 today, and start writing Python you'll be glad to come back to.
