Every Python developer we talk to is somewhere on one of three roads right now. Building AI agents. Training models. Or getting the fundamentals solid enough to do either.
This month we are giving away books for all three. Five winners get PDF and ePub copies of our three bestselling Python titles. You can enter in about 30 seconds at packt.link/draw, and everything about the giveaway is at the bottom of this post.
But first, the useful part. Here is what each of those three paths actually looks like in 2026, what you should learn on each, and where to start.
Path 1: Building an MCP app
Model Context Protocol went from announcement to industry standard in about a year. If you have used Claude with tools, VS Code agents, or almost any serious agentic product recently, you have used MCP without thinking about it. It is the layer that lets an LLM call your code, read your data, and act on your systems in a standardized way.
