Learning Python, 3rd Edition
by Mark Lutz
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Book Reviews of Learning Python, 3rd Edition
Book Review: The Longest Short-way to Python
Summary: 5 Stars
If you are a top-down learner this book is not for you. You can safely pick "Dive into Python".
However, if you are the bottom-up type, you will not regret. While the Python slogan promises "one way to do it", Mark Lutz will show you four, and explore every detail, like complex list comprehensions, closures and the diamond inheritance pattern. This is why you will wait 200 pages (exploring data types) until the introduction of the first Python statement, and 200 pages more for the first script.
But if you cross the details, you will get excellent understandings of the core Python logic, which will save you countless debugging hours in the future.
The OO part alone worth the entire book. It's going from the very basics of OO programming up to elementary design patterns and some advanced OO implementation issues in Python.
One last caution: although 600 pages, this book should be really read cover to cover. It's a true tutorial, which gradually develops the major concepts (sequences, assignments, references, objects, namespaces etc) from the ground up, with (midterm?) exercises. Give yourself a few hours to really learn, exercise your brain (and fully grasp 100 ways to silently override your variables with namespace mistakes). It's a great book.
Book Review: Strong book for Learning Python
Summary: 5 Stars
Overall, I think this is a very good book for learning Python. I'm an expert C/C++ programmer and found that the book was well written and seems to do a good job of bringing people up to speed on Python whether they were relatively new to programming or already intimately familiar with other languages. There are many places in the book that compare concepts to other languages which is helpful to drive home points about the language in addition to the numerous hands on examples in the book.
There were only a few areas that seemed to be slightly too verbose or repetitive (to me) that I'm sure would be more important for those less familiar to programming in general or the OOP concepts covered in the book.
Another part of the book that is very strong is that it does a great job of discussing the evolution of the Python language throughout the book and points out items that puts the history and features of the language into perspective. This is also very practical information relative understanding what you might run into relative to existing code bases that may be developed for differing versions of the language specifications.
Book Review: Good book for starting python
Summary: 4 Stars
This book has about 30 short chapters that focus on introducing a small piece. The author does not assume much experience, and tries to provide a clear explanation of each topic. The book is divided to 7 parts that cover a certain aspect, such as classes or modules.
The examples are mostly small, and very often for the interactive shell rather than as stand alone programs. The author states that this book was written as a learning tool, rather than as a guide to producing real life programs. For that, he guides readers to his follow up book, programming python (which I have not read).
One shortfall was the confinement of exercises to the end of parts (which often have 5 or so chapters) rather than at the end of each chapter. This approach might be alright considering the level of material covered, but I think it would be helpful to have more exercises.
In general, I think this is a good starting point to python, but probably needs to be followed by other books for actual production.
Book Review: This topic will be covered later in the book
Summary: 4 Stars
"This topic will be covered later in the book" is the phrase most often encountered in this book.
Funny - but even on page 593 (out of 635 where appendix begins) we still see "we'll meet such an example in Chapter 28".
It seems like if you take out all the phrases that promise you to explain things in the rest of the book, the book itself will thrink 1/4 of it's size. Why do I even need to be told that you will cover it later in the book - I ASSUME it will be covered if you mention it. If not - refer me to some other resource.
The phrase above is just an example of the writting-alota-words-to-fill-up-space style. The legacy seems to have been carried forward into programming python by the same author on which I am working now.
Unfortunately this seems to be the best book in it's class, and there really is nothing to compare it to (considering it covers python2.5).
Even though I was done with the book in few weeks, I would still have preferred a more concise and to-the-point text.
Book Review: Comprehensive but rather wordy
Summary: 4 Stars
I have learned Python through this book, but to be honest, it wasn't very pleasant (although that's mostly because I was impatient). The book is comprehensive, but it's rather wordy. The two combined mean that it becomes one really huge book. Due to the length, it will take commitment to read through the whole thing, and in my opinion, for the first time learning, there's no need to go through this much detail. That said, I much prefer reading something easier like Byte of Python and use this book for supplement details.
Another issue about this book is its bottom-up approach. To some, it isn't an issue, but the bottom-up approach to learning isn't exactly everyone's thing.
I might have sound negative, but my score should indicate that I find this book an adequate buy. I personally like how the author mentions some common mistakes beginners make while going through certain language features, and I did learn a lot from this book even if it took commitment.