For many programmers, the hardest part isn’t the first few steps. It’s the leap from knowing the basics to writing elegant, expressive code. Python programmers often find this hill as difficult to climb as learners of more complex languages.
Al Sweigart, author of the excellent
Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python. The earlier book was aimed at absolute beginners who wanted to get started with Python and do practical, useful things out of the gate. The new book is in some respects a successor to
Automate, but as Sweigart notes in his introduction,
Beyond the Basic Stuff can follow up most any introductory book to Python.