Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent guide to learning python for beginners+
Comment: I have the 1st edition of this book published in 1999. the 2004 edition is improved in numerous ways and offers excellent examples, thorough explanations and a more gentle learning curve than any other programming book I have ever read.I generally use Python to interface with linux/unix for scripting. I find it MUCH beter than perl for this. the minute I am done with a perl script, my understanding of it begins to deteriorate. Python is just the opposite. Full OOP makes code reuse a reality. clean, understandable syntax makes code I wrote 6 months ago easy to fire up and understand. This is an excellent book. If you are interested in Python, get it.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Better than Perl or Tcl or shell scripts
Comment: It gives a thorough description of how to use Python; which is indeed easy to learn if you already know another language. But when the authors say that not having to compile Python programs means that development time is speeded up, perhaps they are overstating. For most programmers who use compiled languages like C or C++, the biggest time is taken up in finding a method that solves a problem, coding it and subsequent debugging. These days, compilers on recent hardware are fast enough that link/compile times are simply not a bottleneck to development productivity. So it is a bit of a straw dummy that the authors put forth.However, they are absolutely spot on when comparing this to Perl or Tcl. Perl is powerful, but its code looks like assembler. Perl gurus tend to shrug when you point this out, usually saying they understand it, with the not-so-implicit suggestion that if you can't, it is your fault. But this leads to a real maintenance problem and a barrier to entry to others. The cleaner Python syntax can show coding intent far clearer. Plus, and more importantly, the object oriented nature of Python lets you scale up to much larger programs. This has always been a problem with scripting languages, all the way back to the various unix shell scripts and DOS bat files. Often, the most those ever gave you in terms of modular capabilities was the equivalent of subroutines. Which is strictly procedural and not OO. By the way, there is a small contradiction between the above claim that Python is more understandable than Perl and the claim that it has an advantage over C++ or Java because it is not as verbose as those. Typically, in increasing amount of source code, you have Perl -> Python -> (C++,Java). If you think that Python is more understandable than Perl, then by that same logic, we could conclude that C++ or Java is more understandable than Python. So if you are using Perl or Tcl and want something better, Python is a good choice. A good upgrade path. But if you are currently using C or C++, with maybe X for graphics, or Java, then I suggest you stay with those. All three languages, with their graphics, give you a far richer toolset. Python would be a retrograde choice.
Customer Rating:
Summary: still a good read
Comment: Having read this book a couple of years ago, I still browse through it frequently. David presents a gentle intro for the Python beginner but I appreciate the quick summaries of modules and methods. In fact, I reference this book a lot more than my "Essential Python Reference". Buy this book for a good intro to the language and keep it around for future reference.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile for new and experienced programmers
Comment: I own several books on Python, but found this one the best as an introduction. Interspaced throughout the chapters are many examples, which are indeed simple, possibly trivial (as other reviewers have complained), but in fact are purposely so in order to illustrate succinctly the specific points in the surrounding text. As a further and important learning tool are the excellent "test questions" at the end of each chapter. Solving these (answers in the back of the book) will train the fingers to code python and the mind to think python.
Overall the writing style is VERY accessible. After you learn python, you may prefer a very terse reference manual like Python in a Nutshell, but you learn the language best if you start with "Learning Python".
Luckily, the second edition will soon be here -- the reader is advised to wait for that.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Perfect to get started
Comment: As an accountant and controller I had some programming experience as a user, but am no professional programmer. I was looking for an alternative to Visual Basic or C like dialects. I needed a language, to which I could add a database, with which I could process texts and numbers and preferrably spread sheets and above all, which would be simple and effective. I had tried Visual Basic, Delphi, Cache and others, but they all required too much time to start.
My objective was, to construct a database, that would read-in Excel spread sheets containing sales data of different countries every monty, store that data and compile comprehensive sales reports, that could be exported back to MS Excel.
Reading only this book, I was able to achieve this task within one month and was able to present a simple, but effective database, which allowed me to get the go-ahead with my project and earned me the respect of my boss.
I consider this book one of the best introductions I have seen for persons who have some basic knowledge about programming.
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