Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not really useful
Comment: This book is not very good for actually learning Python. It also lacks a reference section and is excessively wordy.
Learning implies tutorials and a gentle progression from basic to advanced subjects; this book does neither. For example, in chapter 3, "How You Run Programs", it introduces modules and namespaces--fairly advanced concepts to read about before even the first "hello world" program! In chapter 4, as it describes the use of numbers and strings, it is already delving deep into the uses and implications of Python's objects.
With well over 500 pages, there should be plenty of room for a reference section, but there is none. There is no list of built-in classes and their methods.
The overall tone of the book is enthusiastic, touting Python's object-orientedness and other advantages. Unfortunately, it is excessively wordy and difficult to read. Cheerleading can be excused, but it is present on nearly every page and gets old quick.
In a book about programming or a programming language, one might want tutorials, reference, discussion of advanced topics, or code examples. This book provides none of these things. I do not recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not worth the expense.
Comment: Programming books have two uses: to teach you and as a reference. This book does an adequate job of teaching, but I'd say that "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" does better, and you can just look at it on the website. The index is lousy, which makes it hard to find things, and it doesn't cover enough material to make it useful. I wish I'd just bought two copies of Python in a Nutshell instead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Learning Python
Comment: You can always depend on the O'Reilly "Learning" series to provide an excellent detailed introduction to any language. You will be up and running after you read this book.
My only complaint is the same material was covered several times as it was expanded in detail.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Usual O'Reilly format, decent delivery
Comment: What cannot be said about how O'Reilly does techy-books?
This book goes into the gory details of text processing, files,
etc. etc. etc. and moves you onto bigger and better OOP related
items, then touches on GUI programming toward the end. I have
yet to get any season of Python (2.2.x and lower) to give me a
great adherence to Tk and similar programming, but this book
gave me further insight on how and why things were done all
around in the language, and a great chunk on RegExp's and even
a bit of web-type text processing. Networking was touched as
well, but it was rather obvious once you 'got' the style of a
method or two in Python, you could yourself right a simple
IPv4 client/server.
This is a great read, especially if you are used to the
O'Reilly format of editing and layout.
Hope this helps-
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great introduction, but please buy 2nd edition
Comment: First things first: don't make the mistake of buying the first edition of this book. I bought it years ago and I was disappointed at how bad (and sometimes silly) the book was.
So this 2nd edition of Lutz's book is a great improvement. Some of the annoyances of the first edition have disappeared (e.g., the vacuous reference to "making things with stuff"), and the style and tone of presentation has been enhanced by making it less sparkling (which makes for a better book, believe me). It looks like the text has been written by different people, or, at least,that they received good editorial advice -- and followed
it.
I am glad that I can now recommend a GREAT book for learning the language.
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