Reviews for Programming Python

1. second edition instead of 3rd edition

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, September 12nd, 2009

   i am sure i requested the 3rd edition of the book, but i surprised that i received the 2nd editition.
   i don't want to read on old books.
   
   who did this mistake?
   
   

2. bloated and useless

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2008

   This book is 1552 pages, and weighs 2.5 kgs. Despite that, nearly every single attempt I've made to look something up in the index has met with failure. Much of the bulk of the book comprises several chapters devoted entirely to python scripts the author has written and clearly feels very proud of. Screen shots, full source code listings, the works. Sadly none of it is of any great educational value.
   
   For much of the rest of the book he relentlessly vomits up the usual unending stream of tired old Monty Python lines, interspersed with his own wildly hilarious observations like "use the Source, Luke!", "I am lost at C" and, most unforgivable of all, "Roses are Red, Violets Are Blue; Lists Are Mutable, and So Is Set Foo". It's like he copied all his section headings from t-shirt slogans on sysadmins at a beer festival.
   
   I was fortunate enough to have pretty much every book on Python going bought for me by my company, and whilst Lutz is by no means the worst offender, he does have by far and away the lowest signal to noise ratio. To be fair it's not all Lutz's fault, and O'Reilly's relentless nosedive into medicrity is to blame. In the old days, he'd have been edited mercilessly and been given a decent index, and a reasonably useful 400 or so page book would have resulted. As it is, the reader is left to do that job themselves from Lutz's raw materials.

3. A good resource of limited usefullness to the python experienced.

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, May 12nd, 2006

   The first disappointment of this book is its win32 approach. It focuses all the examples on execing within a stiff windows environment and does little to orient the scripts to a linux shell. This would be acceptable, were the book providing insight into python programming not freely available on the internet.
   
   The modules being discussed are, for the most part, the well documented std libs which come with python version 2.2. Most of the high-level features of the language are ignored: Packaging modules, Class inheritance models, and general process control (including exceptions).
   
   In my experince, this book should include a disclaimer stating that it teaches basic programming tricks in a python context, and doesnt offer advanced python techniques.
   
   If you are an intermediate to beginner script writer and would like to advance your python skills, this is a good book for you. If you are an advanced programmer looking to streamline python code or transition to python this book should be overlooked. For those of us able to wade through a long library reference it would be preferable to visit the online docs of your python version; it will be much more intuitive and up to date regarding the exotic usage or advanced manipulations the language offers.

4. good for beginners

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2004

   A good book for beginners... and contains enough to keep you going for a long while...

5. NOT Python's answer to Programming Perl

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2002

   I bought this book by its title, expecting it to be the Python equivalent of Programming Perl (the best programming book I've ever read), I was suprised to find it was so different. The book is basically a run through of a vast array of example programs (all provided on the CD-ROM bundled with the book) which Lutz has written for various tasks (CGI, TKinter GUI building, sysadmin). He spends 1200 pages running through the main Python library modules and how he has applied them to these tasks. Some of the programs are quite impressive (an e-mail client for example), and Lutz is clearly making good use of the language.

   This is not a reference book _at all_, you'll need the online docs or another book for that, but surely such a huge book could have made room for _some_ reference material. I was also very shocked when I opened up the book to find Lutz was using Windows to demonstrate program output (I always thought O'Reilly were on _our_ side). In the end I did enjoy reading the book, but I think that is probably because Python is such a good language to learn and use.