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63 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Wordy and disappointing for such a well regarded text., May 23, 2010
This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
This book will teach you Python if you have a lot of patience and are willing to wade through many pages of text to get information. The author wastes a lot of ink stating things like "I'll introduce you to topic XYZ, but you will have to wait until a later chapter to go into detail." Or introducing a topic and then declaring it is outside the books (1216 page) scope. Here's an example from page 85:
"Text pattern matching is an advanced tool outside this book's scope, but readers with backgrounds in other scripting languages may be interested to know that to do pattern matching in Python, we import a module called re."
Pattern matching is a critical feature of any scripting language. I was surprised to see such an important topic thrown away.
The book is divided into sections. I've put page counts and a summary description of the content to further describe the glacial pace of the book:
Part 1: Getting Stared: Pages 1- 72
72 pages to tell you how to run a Python program.
Part 2: Types and Operations 73-258
186 pages to introduce Python types (strings, numbers, sequences, etc)
Page 3: Statements and Syntax - 259-392
If statements are not introduced until Part3.
At this point I gave up and started reading the online tutorial.
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Too much spam; not enough real food to chew on., July 7, 2010
This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
I am only about a quarter of the way through this volume, and I am fairly certain that this is the worst O'Reilly book I have ever encountered. Most of their beginning programming books I have found quite useful, usually providing exercises that help me to think more like a programmer and get a feel for what sorts of things the code I am learning can do. This book, however, will have you printing endless, monotonous variations of "spam spam eggs and spam" at a prompt. I am quite fine with the occasional reference to where Python got its name, but the author of this book seems to think it an excuse not to bother coming up with any real code or problems that one might try to solve with code. I have even looked ahead to the advanced topics section, and the examples are still relying on printing permutations of spam, eggs, and the number 42 to "demonstrate" functions, methods, and even classes.
There are no exercises in this book at all. There are only the barest hints as to what one might use Python for. Each feature is trotted out, given some variation of "spam" or 42 to work on (if you're lucky, maybe you'll get 42.0: a float!), and then the reader is told to consult the Python documentation and "experiment." That's it. No suggestions as to what direction you might like to go with your experiments. Beginning programmers will find very little that will help them to write useful code here. I know enough about programming to know how some of the constructs being mindlessly presented might be used in the real world, but I will probably not continue using this book to learn Python. I would not recommend it to anyone: there is not enough information about the nuts and bolts of programming for a beginner. As someone who has coded a few actual applications, I simply find the endless stream of spam and eggs so mind-numbing that I cannot come up with my own practice problems. This is a book without an audience; I can't even believe the author enjoyed writing it.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The book I wish I started with, September 14, 2011
This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
I avoided purchasing this book initially due to the length and negative reviews posted here. In hindsight this was a huge mistake. Here are some points to consider.
1. This is NOT a book for experiencd programmers. This is a book for novices who want to learn programming using the python language. If your coming from another language, try Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python 3 or a python cookbook. If you are wanting to do something specific, find a topic focused introduction - e.g. Natural Language Processing with Python.
2. The length of the book is from the conversational explanations. Yes it is longer than, say, Mark Summerfield's Python 3: A Complete Introduction. But I can tell you from experience, it reads much, much faster. I find myself FLYING through this book, without having to re-read things seventeen times just to understand what is going on. Keep that in mind.
3. Most of the example code is very simple. Some have complained about this, but there is a very, very big advantage that is overlooked by most of these people - it is very easy to jump around to different sections and not feel lost. I tried doing that in another book and ran into "Remember the 100 lines-of-code example we started 3 chapters ago? We'll continue on with that to show how x function works." No thanks - I just want an explanation of function x please.
4. This book is focused (mostly) on Python 2. If your just starting out, Python 2 is what you need as of August 2011. Most 3rd party libraries and tools still work mostly (or exclusively) with python 2, and it will likely continue to be this way for some time (ex: Django does not support python 3 yet). Don't make my mistake and assume if you know Python 3 you will be able to convert to 2 when needed - the converse is much more practical. If you dont specifically need something from python 3, it doesn't make sense to learn it right now.
5. This book is probably too big to carry around with you day-to-day. That being said, you can always upgrade to an e-book version from O'reilly at significant discount when you already own the physical book (5 bucks I think).
With that in mind, this may or may not be the right book to start with. If not, consider:
1. Learn Python the Hard Way - if you like a hands on approach, with examples that build on prior ones
2. Dive into Python 3 - if you are already have programming experience
3. Python 3: A Complete Introduction - if you want a thorough treatment of Python 3, and have programming experience.
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