I always wanted to master one programming language ( just as hobby). Programming can make your life facile by automating all kind of task. I had learned C during my college but only to pass exam --which I did. Than never looked back to it.

During my professional life I had use R. So, I have excellent knowledge of R (never felt the need to learn other language) but R is mostly for data analysis and data science (that is what I do). Sometime ago, while I was doing some research on data science,  I found that R is not enough, if I wanted to be bad-ass data scientist, I had to learn python.

Learning python is trickier than R, as there are so many thing to learn, so many branches not like R (learn concept of data frame and drive into it). I want to learn python for both data science and as my hobby. This made my learning more trickier. After long research and my person experience, here are steps, that work best and resources.

Step for understand python from basic:

1. Try_python -- basic --  take this course at first

2. Programming Foundations with Python -- basic-- -- best course for stater if you want to understand from basic programming but lack info about loop, data-type.

3. Python--Codecademy -- basic to advance -- beautifully design, you will learn by doing.

After taking these course you can start making project as you like, if you want to drive deep into data

1. Introduction python data science_edx -- basic

2. How to get better at data science -- best blog on this topic.

Need books

1. It ebooks -- free download -- buy books from amazon if you can effort. Support author.

Free online courses (just search python in these website)

1. Udacity -- Most interactive and interesting courses -- first time programmer try introductory course-- you can progress on your pace.

2. Edx--  Interactive but can be boring and fix schedule( you can archive course and take latter too)-- have course from basic to advance.

3. Coursera  -- first time programmer don't try this --most of courses are boring if you don' t have enthusiasm.

* This is my personal view, may be coursera has very interesting and interactive course but I always toke boring class or udacity may have boring class too. See all three website and decide yourself.

Install  python and package can be tricky too

My suggestion is used Anaconda distribution

  -- It comes with more than 200+ popular packages install along with jupyter notebook( ipthyon                 notebook) and spyder(IDE for python)

 -- Another advantage you can install both 2.7 and 3.4 using one click.

       conda create -n python2 python=2.7 anaconda

       Activate environment 

       activate python2

 -- You can also install R and use R in jupyter notebook with single line of code

       conda create -n my-r-env -c r r-essentials

Need help:

1. Stackoverflow

2. Python Docs

3. Google -- ha ha 

Remember if you have to do same task again and again, always find a way to automate it. 

Happy coding :-)