Customer Reviews

Dive Into Python 3

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

After reading a few reviews on what was the best book to learn python, I decided to try out Dive Into Python 3. I however came to the realization, after my purchase, that buying(as this book can also be downloaded free) was a mistake.

Arriving at my door step early in the morning I hurriedly opened the package to "Dive" into it. Firstly, I noticed that the review that stated the book was an exact replica of the PDF version was not joke. The book is littered with many underlined phrases that, on a computer, would surely skip you to a informative webpage or future chapter. No problem, I skip the introduction and go for the meaty bits.

The book teaches python like a biology teacher would teach about a frog's organs. It gave me code that is dissected and then explained. So, as the title suggest, I dived strait into Python by typing the "code" into my computer and observing how it works.

However, while compiling the first example program, I ran into some issues. A real stynax and string definition nightmare. Something wasn't right, I had installed all the right programs, versions matched up and my code was identical to the book, but there where still issues. So I go online and check the HTML version. Turns out the book is printed without any underscores......

Pros:Heavy
Square-ish
Will stop a door or make a good paperweight

Cons:NO UNDERSCORES?!
Source code is useless
Continually have to check online version

My recommendation would be to download the PDF version and give Mark Pilgrim a donation.

I read the original Dive Into Python (printed by APress) and enjoyed it enough that after starting to read the online edition of Dive Into Python 3 I decided to grab a print copy. I really really should've been paying attention and read the other reviews. The SoHo edition is a poorly printed copy of the content available online, and not even adjusted to fit to the book's format. The text is dithered (and therefore hard to read), and all hyphens and underscores are missing from the text and code samples.

I would strongly recommend looking for the APress printing of this book. I learned to write python from Dive Into Python and Pilgrim's writing style is interesting and engaging enough that I'm planning on rereading through most of Dive Into Python 3 (and have enjoyed the little I have read so far), but please don't reward the author's generosity in licensing this book under Creative Commons by buying a copy that does such poor justice to it.

I like the book mainly purchased as a handy copy of all that is good and available on the authors website. However the layout is tiring and unconventional enough to be distracting.

Previous reviews complaining about print quality were referring to the paperback book, not the Kindle version. I have the book on Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone. It's fine on the iPad, not so much on the iPhone. Comments from other reviews about underscores not appearing do not apply to the Kindle version (at least so far; I haven't finished the book).

For the Kindle version, the idiosyncrasy in the formatting of this book is that all the included code snippets or interactive Python sessions are rendered as images, not text. So if you change your font size it has no effect on these portions. On the iPad they are small but legible, and with a spread-finger gesture you can make them as large as you like. On the iPhone they are barely legible if you don't expand them. The description says "optimized for large screens" or words to that effect, and they mean it.

If you're fortunate enough to have a large-format device and you're an experienced C++ or Java programmer, I highly recommend this book. I previously bought "Learning Python" which is excellent for its audience, but for those already familiar with other programming languages and object-oriented programming, there's way too much information that you already know. If you're already an accomplished programmer and you just want to learn Python, Dive Into Python is well written and is targeted at you.

This book is absolutely great if you want to get into the Python language. It's writing is clear and understandable, its examples tie the different aspects of the language together in a way that quickly allows you to be productive with Python.

I think if you have absolutely no previous programming knowledge (in other languages like PHP or Java for example) you might have a hard time to really get the most out of this book, you might either want to check out some generic tutorials out first, but if you do know basic programming concepts, this book will enable you to write great Python code to solve your problems very quickly.

I have tried the sample on my kindle 3. The text looks all right, but the code examples are represented by graph. This is not good because: 1) you cannot choose the font size ; and 2) in some cases the side of «graphs» are cut off.

I would have bought it if the code examples are represented as text.

It sounds like the print copy for this book is bad. Also, I found out you can view or download the book for free online:[..]