Customer Reviews

Learning Python, 3rd Edition

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was sorely disappointed by this book. I normally love O'Reilly books and was very glad to see that they had make a beginners book for Python; but this book is just terrible. Like others have said, its very very wordy, repeating even the most simplistic concept 5 different times but discussing the more complicated parts with esoteric examples - which is what is accounting for the majority of this book's pages.

Though I have now become a pretty decent Python programmer, this book had absolutely nothing to do with it. Instead I would highly recommend Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional) which is a fantastic book for learning and great for reference.

This is the first O'Reilly book that I will say that I regret purchasing. Coming from Perl and now trying to see what the hype with Python is about. I know Java as well as C++, so I understand OO and all it is supposed to do.

So far I am on page 200 and I still can't do a darn thing with the language. Instead the author chooses to spend pages explaining how python handles objects in memory (not sure how I supposed to understand what an object is if I never did another language). It is now page 200, I have no idea how to do loops, no idea how to accept input or even how to print a string. This book is terrible. My learning Perl book is only 200 pages long and packed with useful information. This book just goes into detail about the language and how it operates internally. That would be fine towards the end of the book, but as it stands this is the only O'Reilly book I can't recommend.

If you are not a programmer by trade and are looking to learn python, wait to buy this book. It certainly provides thorough information, but it is really, really dry. Personally, I prefer a book that teaches you through exercises and examples where one lesson builds on the concepts of the last. This book does that, but to a boring degree.

I read through 80% of the book and didn't feel like I learned python because I hadn't put it into practice. I later bought the "Python Programming for the absolute beginner" book by Michael Dawson. This book gets right to the point and lets you learn by doing.

This book should be called "Learning Python for people who have never programmed before". The author states in the preface that no assumptions have been made about the reader's programming background. I think that this is why this book is so wordy.

Amazon's opening statement: "The authors of Learning Python show you enough essentials of the Python scripting language to enable you to begin solving problems right away..." Well, not right away. You have to read half the book first. The book delves into the details of data object types before even talking about basic programming features such as for/while loops (pg. 248). This book is an obvious outcropping of the author's classes on Python. I would think that the author's approach would be fine in a classroom setting, but this hand-holding approach in print is laborious.

The book also has altogether too many references to later chapters. I got tired of reading "X will be covered later in chapter Y". If you aren't going to talk about it now, don't waste the reader's time talking about how you are not going to talk about it now.

That said, I found the information in the book to be useful.

I just received "Programming in Python 3" by Mark Summerfield. This book takes the approach I wish that "Learning Python" had.

I just spent a few days going through this book and learned a lot. I've been working with PHP for years, but never did much complicated code. I studied Java about 8 years ago also and learned a lot about OOP from that. But never did any programming in Java. So it was all concept, no experience.

My reason for reading this book was to start using Python with Django. I wanted to learn Python first so I would understand the framework better.

This book covers in excruciating detail many of the finer qualities of just about everything you can imagine being in the language. I'm sure it doesn't cover everything the language can do. But somehow it spends 600 plus pages going over details that I wouldn't expect to find even if I was reading a 300 page book called "What I was thinking when I wrote this particular function on July 3rd 1991"

If something can be explained by 2 lines of example code and a three sentence paragraph about what's going on, the author does that -after 2 pages of explanation of how this code you are about to see might be a little like C, but it's a little different too, and how what you are going to learn is really powerful, and how some students might notice that the code is similar in structure to the code that you will see on page 400 later in the book.

If you think my review is way too verbose, read the book.

I give it 3 stars because it was in fact clear and well communicated information. It was just often hard to keep reading past all the unnecessary words to get to the useful content.

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.

I'm an experienced C++ programmer, wanting to learn python. The very bottom-up organization of the book makes it hard to be productive without reading the entire book. I just finished it, and I think it presented a very clear, logical description of the language. However, if you only read the first half, you don't know "beginning python". Rather, you know half of the language, and can't do anything useful. This is entirely the wrong book to read if you need to write some useful python code tomorrow.

It was a little wordy and repetitive in places, but goes into enough depth to give a good understanding of the language.

I'm disappointed in this book; I'm at page 128, and I am still not learning any other python than one or two line commands.

I had expected something like Learning Perl: right from the start, that Perl book contains small, 5 to 15 line programs from which you learn Perl quickly.

Not in this book Learning Python. So far it looks more like a summary of available commands and Python grammar.

"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.

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.