Do I need to read books to learn programming?

Question

Python

I am learning python. I read a couple of books, look at examples, at the same time I write something small myself, I check how what I read about works, I experiment, in general, I play. But I don’t have real, serious tasks to consolidate the material with practice. People say that books should be read as the problem arises, that is, that practice is primary. But where do the problems come from if I'm not working as a programmer?
Does it make sense to read books on programming in general, and in particular the way I do it?

Answer 1

Don't listen to stupid people, how can you practice what you don't know yet.
On Python, you read Lutz, first "Learning Python", then "Programming in Python" along the way you make examples to understand.
After that, choose what you taught it all for, if the web, then Django is great to learn from the rest of the documentation, even in Russian, if Big Data or Machine Learning, then I don’t know what to advise, but there are a lot of books.
And then, of course, practice and knowledge of other different tools is important. For example, Git, pip (although there seem to be still competitors), you can see the rest in the vacancies, I'm not a pythonist.
If the web, then you definitely need to know at least the basics of SQL.

Answer 2

Read "Perfect Code". It's not about python, it's about programming in general. Very inspiring and thought provoking.
And yet, you need to know the capabilities of the standard library and popular additional modules (Requests, jinja2, beautifulSoup, etc.). This will allow you to quickly or even immediately see solutions to problems. And vice versa, to see that this is what I can easily program.