Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: "Learning Python" is right
Comment: The title of this book says it all: "Learning Python" is a great book to read if you want to learn Python. Granted, Python is not the hardest language in the world to learn, and I'm not sure that this book goes into enough detail about Python's trickier features (generators, anonymous functions, etc.). Still, I was able to sit down, read this book, work through the examples, and walk away feeling like I really knew how to develop software in Python. Most learn-a-language books are too dense for you to learn the language from the book alone, but "Learning Python" definitely made it as easy as possible.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A more appropriate title would have been "Learning to program using Python"
Comment: This book spends a LONG time going over some of the fundamental concepts of programming. Although it does include very thorough coverage of the Python language itself, it suffers in many places from not knowing who its target audience is. For example, there are many comparisons made between Python and Java (and even C); however, one would assume that anybody with even a passing familiarity with another language knows what a "variable" is or that you shouldn't type the "c:\python22> " part when following along with the examples. If this demeanor was limited to the first few chapters, it might not have bothered me, but throughout the book, the authors can't seem to figure out if they're talking to experienced programmers or people who need to be reminded where the "on switch" is. Chapter 19, for example, is 12 full pages of "the concepts of Object-Oriented programming".
However, it's worth slogging through page after page of intro to programming material to get to the discussions on some of Python's advanced features, which they do cover well. I had previously tried learning Python from the online tutorial and although I made some progress, I could tell I was missing some concepts. After reading this book, I feel like I understand the "Python philosophy" - a few days ago, I wrote "datetime.date( *[ int( x ) for x in token.split( '-' ) ] )" in a program - on purpose! (That creates a date object from a string in the form "2007-05-13", if you're curious).
If you've got a reasonable amount of programming experience, you might want to start with "Python in a Nutshell" instead, though; as well written as this book is, it could have been two-thirds as long and still contained all the information I needed from it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners...
Comment: This book bills itself as a book for beginners to programming but actually it's for experienced C programmers who are making the transition to Python. Someone with little coding experience will quickly get discouraged due to all the poorly explained terminology and constant references to C. Also, the pattern of the book is to give an introductory chapter on basic concepts then two or three chapters that get into extremely detailed explanations. At the end of one of those mind-numbing journeys through obscure details, the author will often will often say something like "But I would suggest you avoid doing this because..." Huh? Then why even bother to explain it? I can't believe Python is as dense and involved as this book makes it. If the authors would only spend as much time on simple, logical explanations as they do on explaining why Python is superior to every other programming language on the planet, this book might be useful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: fast shipping
Comment: The shipping is very fast, and the condition of the book is cool!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good as Python books go, I guess
Comment: I have been writing code, primarily in C and C++ since a long time ago. I picked this book up because I needed to pick Python up quickly, and this is the book my boss was reading.
The book does a good job of discussing the basic syntax of Python, and to some extent the design and working philosophy behind the very high level, dynamically typed language.
However, it is little more than that. The author is just not in the same league as other programming authors like Kernighan & Ritchie for C, Koenig, Myers, and Moo for C++, etc. There is little advice on how to use the language. I don't mean that in a syntactical/strictly usage sense, but from a computer science manner. For example, after reading this book, you would have no idea about how to implement a linked list in Python. In fact, you would not even know that it is not that great an idea to even want to implement a linked list in Python for most cases, and of course you would not know which cases are counterexamples of that. You would have no idea of how to create even slightly complex data structures like trees.
Of course, there is no requirement for and "introduce the language" type book to actually cover all that - but I those other authors are all that I have read in "language" books, so that is my comparison set. Sadly, I don't know of a good alternative to this book. "Beginning Python..." by Apress talks a little more these things, but that too is not organized nicely.
I guess there just aren't great Python authors around. You just pick the language and learn the tricks on your own.
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