Dive Into Python 3 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Paperback]

Mark Pilgrim (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430224150 | ISBN-13: 978-1430224150 | Publication Date: October 21, 2009 | Edition: 1

There are a huge number of python developers who will need to learn to port their code to python 3, and Dive Into Python 3 is the ideal hands-on introduction to the latest version of python for them. Its unique style of giving a chunk of code first and then picking it apart is ideally suited to existing developers who want to understand the new version of the language quickly.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Pilgrim has been an advocate of open source and open standards for over 15 years. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, two children, and a floppy-eared dog.

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (October 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430224150
• ISBN-13: 978-1430224150
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #241,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #64 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > Python

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars good content, but poorly produced physical book, March 25, 2010

By 

ErikB - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dive Into Python 3 (Paperback)

I came to this book after slogging through 200pgs of the tome that is Learning Python and getting nowhere. Dive into Python 3 is a more reasonable size, and from reading a few of the chapters online at [...], I felt that Mark Pilgrim had done a good job of writing a Python introduction. I would probably rate the content as 4 or 5 stars.

I was happy enough that I wanted to buy the physical printed edition of the book, to have as a reference and to support the author. I was expecting that the content had been professionally reformatted for book form, with suitable typeface selection and reflowed text. However, I was sorely disappointed when I received my printed copy. It would appear that SoHo Books has done nothing but take the PDF from Mark Pilgrim's site and printed it. I might not mind, except that this was done very poorly. I immediately noticed that the typeface was small, sans-serif, and worst, dithered! The letters are drawn with small,fine dots as if this were printed on an old dot-matrix printer. The result is unlike any other printed book I have, and I consider this unacceptable. The fonts in the PDF appear to be vector drawn when I scale it, and thus SoHo has no excuse for not doing a cleaner job of scaling the pages down. And that's all they did: take pages formatted for 8.5" x 11" and scale them down to about 5.5" x 7" or so. Further, they wastefully left 1.75" of dead white space on top and 1.5" on the bottom.

This cheap printing is a shameful waste of a tree, when it could have been done really well. I would have a much higher quality version if I had printed it on my own printer. I thank the author for licensing his work with the Creative Commons license, but I'm sad to report that I'll be returning this print version. I'll hold out hope that these problems could be corrected for future printings.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book with which to start, October 3, 2009

By 

calvinnme - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dive Into Python 3 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

Python now comes in two flavors--Python 3 and Python 2. The philosophy of programming in Python 3 diverges from Python 2 to the point that print statements written in three don't even run properly in two. Unfortunately, so many of the books written using Python over the last few years are still using version 2.6 - which is backwards compatible with all previous versions. If you are buying this book because you are taking a class in which the teacher is using Python rather than teaching it -bioinformatics or visualization for example - this may cause you trouble. If you need to learn 2.6 or an earlier version of Python 2, please buy the previous edition.

If you are learning Python for the first time and it's up to you as to what flavor of Python to learn, then I suggest you start with Python 3. It does fix some longtime problems with the Python language. In that case, this edition of "Dive Into Python" is what you want.

I tend to learn languages more readily if I write a simple program first then add to its complexity by having more complex aspects of the language revealed to me, which is basically the approach of "Dive Into Python". What worked best for me when I learned Python 2 was to read the free online guide "Dive Into Python" which is incomplete but top-down, then switch to "Learning Python", which is detailed but more academic and more of a bottom-up approach. For example, while this book is about 500 pages, the new "Learning Python" book by Mark Lutz is 1200 pages long.

The author of this book has continued his tradition of placing his book online free of charge if you wish to look through it. I have read this updated version in order to update to Python 3. However, the author realizes that if you like his book you'll want a copy for yourself to carry about and in which to scribble notes. Sometimes you can make more money by being generous.

In summary, I highly recommend this book as a way to get started, but then you'll probably want to proceed to "Learning Python" for advanced topics and as a reference.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars *very* poor print quality, July 17, 2010

By 

J. Hopson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dive Into Python 3 (Paperback)

The print quality of this book is awful. My copy looks like it was printed on a cheap inkjet printer. The print is tiny. Really tiny. And the top and bottom margins are 1-3/8" each! Seriously, is this a joke?

This book probably has some great content, but the print quality is so bad it's worthless.