Customer Reviews

Beginning Python: Using Python 2.6 and Python 3.1 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The first book I read on Python was "A Byte of Python". You can find it on the net. It is free. That book was compact, effortless, useful, but, still, a rather basic intro.

I was looking for a something, which would take me further. We had quite a few Python books scattered around the office. Long story short, I liked none of them. Then I chanced upon James Payne's book, and I cannot praise it enough!! Very well structured, very readable, actually, engaging! Full of useful, clear, elegant examples, it covers a lot of subjects, but not at the expense of basics or clarity. Every new subject, whether it is network or database access, continues to teach you the language itself. It is quite good as a reference too.

It is not for absolutely clueless, but if you have even minimal experience with programming, I bet, you will find it remarkably useful. It is a book Python deserves.

I have not read this book in its entirety, but I read the sections which were of particular interest to me, like intro to Django, Web services programming and DB programming. Although it is a book labeled as introductory, it does take the reader beyond introductory material in a progressive, clear and concise way, leaving all the cruft out and providing great explanations as to the "why" the technology works the way it does. The book is a great find and will help a novice avoid unnecessary confusion.

The only caveats are:

1) Some of the examples in the book seem to work with Python 3.0, so if you want to make them work with either Python 2.6 or Python 3.1 you will need to make minor adjustments. The labor of finding the adjustments is however a learning exercise per se.

2) If you're using Windows as your primary environment, some of the examples, i.e. cgi, require you to have handy a *IX box. This is also not problematic as you can run Ubuntu or other *IX in a VM.

I have read several other books on python, and I really found this one helpful. It gets through the basics and keeps going into basic GUI programming, web CGI programming, multithreading, everything. To top it all off, this book is more modern than other books I read through. It has sections on 2.6 but focuses on 3.1. I'd really recommend this if you want to learn USEFUL python programming.

This is a strange book. While it says that it is for beginners, it often makes large jumps with no explanation. (For example, it barely talks about code blocks before using them). On the other hand, there are some areas (like "not") which it belabors.

It is badly in need of a proofreader. In addition to spelling errors, it does not always get the case of letters right -- and Python is case sensitive.

It does have some exercises, which I consider crucial for any learn to program book.

For a beginner, I would recommend "Head First Python", and for someone who knows how to program, I would recommend "Programming in Python 3" by Summerfield. I don't see who this book is aimed at.

Even though it's in the Wrox "Programmer to Programmer" series, it's for non-programmers.
If you're a programmer, spend your money somewhere else.
Also, a huge number of typos, which is true of most Wrox books I've bought.

This book is written in engaging style, clearly structured and overall very helpful.
I am an expert Matlab programmer who is starting out with Python. I have not read the initial sections of the book, and jumped straight to chapter 6. The examples I tried were helpful, but appeared to be incomplete. For instance, in chapter 6, some of the function headers do not entirely match up with what each function actually performs. Another concrete example, the author defines the function "has" and "has_various," but uses "has" instead of "has_various" when explaining how to use the code. That's not a deal breaker, and it's definitely okay for me to follow along, but I bet that this would confuse a novice programmer. When you're new to programming it can be very frustrating when examples don't 100% match their description. Therefore I would hesitate to recommend this books to students. I hope that a future revised edition would be more carefully proof-read with attention to details, because overall, the book is didactically well structured.

Before I tell you how I feel about this book, you should know that I've programmed in Visual Basic, and Java, and was exposed to Python (via Learning Python by Mark Lutz) before reading this book. I'm currently up to the chapter on Classes and Objects in the Beginning Python book, by James Payne.

That being said, this book is a disaster. There are some pretty blatant errors in the code. For example, when he uses the method value() or key() on a dictionary, where the actual method is values() or keys(). For a complete beginner, just coping the code from this book and trying to understand it, this kind of overlook by the editor can be extremely frustrating. Some of his code is incorrect given what he probably wants it to accomplish, and makes me question how much experience the author has as a programmer (his custom methods work for a specific case, but not for all cases that the method should be able to handle). His explanations of what's going on with the code, and what different parts of programming are, (specifically classes and objects) are just not very good, especially in comparison to Gaddis (Java) and Lutz (Python). One would expect this to be a professional piece of literature, geared towards people who are new to programming, but it just isn't.

If you're new to programming, I highly recommend that you look for another book. If you're an experienced programmer, just sorting through his many errors may be too much for you to deal with.

I'm typically reluctant to recommend Learning Python by Mark Lutz, mostly because it is extremely dense, expensive, and doesn't show what you're currently learning in a fully functional program (it only uses IDLE, for the most part). Lutz's book, however is a much better option than this one, if you can get through it.

I'm trying to learn Python (specifically 3.1) and thought this book would be a good choice. I have programmed in other languages (primarily VB) but am a newbie to Python.
I wanted to like this book but I can't recommend it for the following reasons:
The author writes as if he doesn't know who his audience is, or understands them. Each chapter basically comprises of short topics (with code to enter) with brief explanations after each code sample. The problem is that he would introduce a feature or topic without giving a good explanation of how it works. The explanatory text is generally too short, maybe 2 or 3 sentences. If you are a beginner to Python (much less programming) I think you will be confused at various points due to general ambiguity about how a feature works. Examples:
He defines an imaginary number as the square root of -1. While that may be a technical description that isn't really a good one for someone trying to conceptualize it.
He introduces format specifiers but does not list the different types. Instead this is split across different chapters. Even so, format specifiers can be weird enough to someone who hasn't encountered these before and I think better explanatory text is needed here. (C programmers will get them, not sure about everyone else)
In general, the pace and "feel" of the book doesn't seem to be right in my opinion.

If you have programmed in another language and want to learn Python I would recommend The Quick Python Book, Second Edition instead. While thinner than "Beginning Python" I find it more useful.

I think this book is for beginners of Python, but are already programmers. If find it difficult to read. I have found a good beginner tutorial [...]. Also, a better book for new programmers is byte of python.