Customer Reviews

Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I believed that so many people that write good reviews can not be wrong. But I was wrong, as everybody that write good reviews :)

First of all, I think author of the book has a prioritization and ordering issue. Any programming book that especially written for beginners has an ordering (data types, statements, expressions, collections etc.), but author mentions about every issue that comes in his mind regardless of being in an irrelevant chapter. For example, while mentioning about data structures in first chapter (and I think it should be a later issue), he mentions about operator overloading and garbage collection. And I think he can not handle the differences between Python 2.6 and 3.0 in a clear and tidy way. Expressing every difference between each release on every expression, structure or definition causes losing the focus on the real information. I prefer he would write the whole book on Python 3.0, cause anybody that buys this book now on would probably use Python 3.0 instead 2.6, and express really important differences on 2.6 in a separate section on each chapter for people that interested with them.

This book is really hard to read from start to the end. It immediately ruin your focus on the real subject with mentioning different and not so useful topics at that moment. I really tried it, but I couldn't continue to read and practice above 45 minutes.

I decided to continue with another book, and really do not recommend this book for anyone wants to learn Python.

Go read all those 1 star ratings first. You will find all the 1 star ratings for this book have pointed out the same problems. The title "Learning Python" is really misleading and the author does not have a clear clue on how to write a textbook about a programming language. It is impossible for beginners to start using Python in their daily work after reading the first hundreds of pages of this book, which has more pages than a C++ book. Why should I bother writing a simple statement in three different ways as a beginner who has an expectation of ease to use for Python? You can find some online tutorials are better organized and helpful. Probably this book will be more useful for those who already knew Python, but I really doubt it since the book is just too lengthy for simple concepts and not enough or no explanations at all for those tricky things.

I bought the third edition of this book, in late 2004, when I found out that the software I was using at work was transitioning to Python as its internal scripting language. I knew nothing about Python, but I had worked in Visual Basic and C++, so I wasn't completely new to programming. I carried the book around with me for months, reading it on my lunch breaks and during downtime. It was the easiest introduction to a programming language I have ever encountered. Much of that is due to Python's ease of use, but this book is still the one I grab when I need to refresh my memory on a topic.

This book is not a how-to reference, or a "cookbook" of sample scripts. It's more of an explanatory introduction to the Python language. It tells you how to write Python applications. If you're looking for pre-written code examples, you're best off doing a Google search, or going with one of the Python books that is more specific to your project. If you want to know what those examples are doing, and learn how to program in Python, start here. Some previous programming experience will be helpful, but it's not required.

I am a bit wary of the fourth edition of this book. It went from a concise and readable 552 pages to what is almost certainly a bloated 1216 pages. I can't imagine keeping a book that size in my bag at all times, like I did with the previous edition. I would almost recommend going with the 3rd edition, if you're starting from the absolute beginning. Python 3.0 is covered in the new edition, but it's easy to transition from 2.x to 3.0 once you know the foundations of the language. Most of the existing code libraries are still in 2.x at this point, so it's definitely not obsolete.

I bought this book because I was starting a job that required Python programming. In the past, I have always been impressed by the usefulness of O'Reilly's books. But now, I am boycotting O'Reilly because of this book. The book is physically enormous - almost too big to even read effectively. The book is verbose, chatty, and anecdotal - but does is spell out the language in a manner that a highly trained and experienced programmer can make use of - NO! I am still stunned at how useless this book has proven to be, and I get mad every time I see it on my desk. I have been unable to answer a single syntax question using this book - instead I go straight to the Python reference manual online. Save your money, and your bookshelf space for something you can either use or at least enjoy!!

If you have any type of programming background (in my case, quite a lot of bash, awk, some perl, some java, a little of this and that in-between) and are looking for anything resembling a comprehensive tutorial on learning python, you'll find yourself quickly infuriated with this book. As a reference, it's pretty good. As "LEARNING PYTHON" it is incredibly inadequate... And God help the poor shmoe who tries to learn Python as their first language from this book. Here are the basic problems:

First of all, one does not learn how to program in a new language until you ACTUALLY start programming in said language. O'Reilly books generally take one of two approaches in this respect: Very hands on or very run-down-ish (for experienced programmers, the main features of the language are described in great detail that borders on comprehensive for the scope of an introductory text, and then end of chapter tests and exercises force you to employ this knowledge). Not only will it take dozens of hours (perhaps 4, maybe 2) of PURE UNADULTERATED READING (with more "more on this basic function of programming much, much later" which is a nice way to say: YOU STILL CAN'T USE ANYTHING I'VE TOLD YOU after a WEEK OF PURE READING), the vast majority of the first 300 pages is incomplete even as a reference. I mean, I understand the learning process, and how an author has to strike a careful balance between comprehensiveness of the material versus the skill level of the student, but EVERY SINGLE TEACHABLE MOMENT of the first 230 some odd pages is completely wasted, asking the reader to endure more (incomplete - because everything that would make anything familiar/usable to anyone with programming experience is always 400 pages away) basic gibberish. And it's not even COMPREHENSIVE GIBBERISH.

A book for beginners that's written in this fashion should either be comprehensive enough so that they can start coding with the information that they've learned, or be so obtuse as to deserve inclusion in the O'Reilly "In A Nutshell" series (which I have great respect for, btw). Regardless: it does not deserve the title of "Learning Python," as it fails to teach programming to either intermediate level programmers or beginners in any meaningful way; beware all ye who enter here with the goal of actually "learning python."

I don't HATE this book, but I don't like it at all; it lives in a distant bookshelf as a reference. Anyone who buys it hoping to 'LEARN PYTHON' will probably find themselves served better by google searches for freely available python documentation and tutorials. To that end, I have (charitably) given it 2 stars.

Learning Python is written by an expert in Python training, and it shows. The author fully explains each language feature, pointing out common mistakes beginners make, and explaining the finer points repetitively. The author carefully details the inner workings of Python from the ground up, explaining in great detail how objects are combined to form expressions, which in turn form statements, which are packaged as functions in modules.

The problem with this approach is that it's only until part III of the book, at about page 300, that the reader finally has enough information to write useful programs. Worse, there are not enough programming exercises for the reader to practice all of the nuances that are explained so carefully again and again. The result is that it's hard to apply the theoretical knowledge about Python learned from the book into the practice of writing Python programs, and without writing code it is difficult to retain the information presented in the book.

The book should have fewer explanations and more exercises, because the experience of writing code will drive home a point more thoroughly than explaining it many times over. While reading the book, I started working on problems from Project Euler and the Python Challenge to help me solidify the knowledge I was tenuously grasping from just reading the numerous and tedious explanations. This practical programming experience helped, but I would have preferred the author to give exercises that were crafted specifically to clarify the subtleties of the book's explanations.

Perhaps the best aspect of the book is that it covers all the basics of Python as well as a few advanced topics. One of the problems with O'Reilly's books for beginning Perl programmers is that basic material is split over multiple volumes. Although this is not a cheap book, at least it covers enough material to be worth the cost. It covers all the basics of the language Python, although it does not cover commonly used libraries, such as the regular expression library.

This is a well written book with very clearly written and detailed explanations, and those who read it and do the exercises will be able to program in Python. I'm not sure how many of the explanations will be retained by readers who do not carefully put into practice the nuances of Python right after reading the book.

I am completely disappointed by this book. It has no structure. In most of the cases writer starts a concept and left it in the middle stating that we will look this in next chapter. It creates confusion in the learners mind. Everything was repeated 4-5 times and there is not link between concepts.
I will not recommend this book to any one.