I’ve read a ton of software engineering books and python specific books and haven’t found any of them to be any better than just reading the online documentation about the standard library. https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

There are a bunch of books I would recommend if you just want to read and grow yourself as a software developer. But if your goal is to better understand what you can do with python and how, you can’t really get better than the standard library documentation.

At a bare minimum I would expect that anyone who calls themselves familiar with Python to know the table of contents of the page I linked, even if you don’t know all the components in each section. But for any given problem you should know where in the Python docs you can go to learn more about the broad area of solutions.

Out of that, I specifically recommend doing a deeper dive into the following modules:

• string
• datetime
• enum
• itertools
• functools
• pathlib
• csv (if that sounds like something you would use)
• os
• argparse (if you build CLI tools)
• logging
• asyncio (this gets sticky fast, but is more and more relevant every day)
• json
• unittest (in the real world we almost exclusively use a 3rd party tool, pytest)
• sys