Python for Everybody (PY4E)

Dr. Charles Severance — Dr. Chuck to roughly everyone — built Python for Everybody at the University of Michigan School of Information, and it has become the default recommendation for people who want to program but aren't planning to become software engineers. The framing is data rather than computer science: you learn Python in order to get at information.

The whole thing is genuinely free at py4e.com, which is unusual for material of this pedigree. The site hosts the video lectures, the textbook, autograded assignments, a gradebook and discussion forums, and the same course also runs on Coursera, edX and freeCodeCamp with different certificate arrangements.

What it covers

• Python basics — variables, conditionals, loops, functions
• Strings, files, lists, dictionaries and tuples
• Regular expressions, taught practically rather than exhaustively
• Networked programs and using web APIs
• Scraping and parsing HTML, XML and JSON
• Databases and SQL from Python
• Data visualisation at the end

Where it deliberately stops

This is not a software engineering course and never claims to be. Object-oriented programming gets a light touch, testing barely appears, and there's no discussion of packaging, environments, type hints or how to structure a codebase larger than a script. If you finish PY4E and walk into a job writing Python professionally, the gap between the two will be immediate. That's a scope decision, not an oversight — but people do mistake this course for a complete Python education.

Who it's for

Absolute beginners, career-changers, researchers, journalists, analysts, and anyone whose actual job is getting data out of somewhere awkward. Dr. Chuck's teaching is slow, warm and repetitive in the useful way. Skip it if you already program — you'll find the first half unbearable — and skip it if you want machine learning or web development, since neither is here.

Our take

Still the best free first Python course after more than a decade, largely because the autograder and the gradebook mean you get told when you're wrong. Two honest weaknesses: the production is dated, and the certificate situation is confusing. The free py4e.com version gives you badges and a completion record rather than a recognised certificate; the Coursera version issues one but charges for it. If a credential matters to you, work out which platform you're on before you start rather than at the end.