Customer Rating:  
Summary: extremely disappointed
Comment: I bought this book because I originally bought the author's Programming Python book mistakenly thinking it would be similar to the Programming Perl book (which is a stellar book, where as the Python equivalent is more like a cookbook). It was immediately obvious that I was NOT going to learn Python from that book so I bought this one. Again, a mistake. It may be a fair overview of Python but it did not give me the tools I needed to be productive right away; and if it did have the information that I was looking for it was not obvious. Simple things like writing to standard error, file tests, executing separate programs and saving the output, parsing text, even how to force a script to bloody exit... basically common things people expect from a scripting language right away were given either little, weak, or *NO* obvious treatment. The appendix is no help either, I could not find most of these simple operations listed there under the usual key words. I'm sorry to say but this is the worst O'Reilly book I've come accross and (together with Programming Python) is a black mark on the series.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Comment: This book really has everything you need to know to start coding python. I know perl, java and C++ so everything was very clear to me and I've never seen object oriented programming explained so well in any other book (pythons syntax helps of course).
A new edition is needed though, not only because it doesn't cover python 2 but also because it doesn't cover packages and a few other things that were covered in the 1st edition of Programming Python but not in the 2nd edition.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Learning Python (Help for Programmers)
Comment: An EXCEPTIONAL introductory learning manual. My programming background is strictly mainframe Cobol (15 years). I have never coded in C, C++, OOP, or any other open-source language. I have found this book to be very easy to read, to understand, and to utilize in coding new applications. Even though Python is currently in release 2.2, this release 1.5 version of Learning Python is still 100% applicable.If you are learning Python: YOU NEED THIS BOOK !!
Customer Rating:
Summary: An average book at best
Comment: This book is a terribly lazy attempt at writing a Python tutorial.
Sure, you can read it from start to finish, and write yourself some working Python code. However, when you want to write something slightly different to what is covered in this book, you suddenly realise how incomplete this book is. Eg, it covers the hasattr, getattr, setattr, and delattr built in functions, which is fine if you already know what attributes an object has, but in no way can I work out with this book how, or if it is even possible, to get a list of an object's existing attributes. It is incredibly frustrating trying to learn Python from this book. I am writing this review because I came online to look for a better Python book. I was hoping to find something by the Wrox publishers, as their Beginning Java2 is excellent, but it looks like I am out of luck...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Simply dreadful
Comment: Having previously read several O'reilly Perl books I thought that learning Python from this text would be straight forward. Unfortunately this book has none of the helpful examples that the Perl books have and also dissappointing was the reluctance to write the code as you might using a text editor. Instead the authors seem to prefer to write code as it would be run from the interpreter on the commandline. This made it really hard to write any Python using the text editor. All in all a complete waste of money.
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