Customer Reviews

Python Phrasebook

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Has great little snippets of code. is very clear in what is says and how to achieve your goals. While it seems to be intended at people with prior Python experience. I had previously only done python debugging. and that combined with perl, bash and C experience i was able to pick up the concepts and get functional quickly (I got done what i wanted to quickly). It is a handy little guide that I am sure I will use regularly.

Almost everything I wanted to accomplish I got done just by using this book.

two weak points.
1) could have covered number formatting in output
2) dealing with dates is not really covered

I've been learning Python through the documentation and tutorials that I've found online, including "Dive Into Python", which is a great introduction to Python available as a free PDF. I am writing code in Python and I have not been satisfied with the Python books I've seen and I want to take my code further. I want to write code like a Python programmer would. I need to be reminded of syntax at times, such as splitting strings, but I don't want to go back to the beginner book. I need to learn new ways and new things I can do with Python.

This well written, simple little book fills that niche. You can put it in your pocket and read it on the train. It's well written and succinct. It's not for learning Python for the first time, you need more explanation and examples when you are learning new concepts. This book is a good reminder of things you already learned but has not completely stuck yet.

Examples I have already used are the string manipulation sections, threads and socket programming. I will probably use the HTML parsing examples next. In his examples Dayley does offer explanation. For example, he describes the elements of the try statement, including the finally, the else and the except parts. However this is done in only two paragraphs. It's a good memory jogger and reference if you already know the syntax.

In the string manipulation section, searching strings, comparing strings, splitting and joining, replacing, trimming and formatting are all covered. In addition, there is a little gem about executing strings as Python code. All the examples are useful and can be included immediately in your code!

I think I'll go through this guide pretty quickly, since it's small, but it's valuable and it's worth having. Let me repeat, this book is for a beginning Python programmer who is learning the basics with some other material, or has already learned the basics.

You can always find example code online, in various blogs, articles and tutorials, however it's easier to have one book by a single author that's well written and has a consistent voice. I highly recommend this book, and I wish the publisher would put out more small books like this. They are so easy to carry and have around.

Half the book is about internet.
I was disapointed by the absence of math things. 1 or 2 pages could have given an overview of the main math functions. Also no string-numeric conversion functions such as str(), float()... are given. This book is definitely not for scientists or science engineers/technicians.
Things presented are detailed, but they are quite limited.
A fully operational code example often meaningless follows every function introduced. It would be better to my opinion to introduce the functions individualy and then show an example showing several functions in action in a script that means something.

I agree with the review that says that the book is good for beginners; It gives you some nice insights on where to start when trying out some scripts for handling files and folders or dealing with strings.

However, I also think it emphasizes the Web a lot. I would like to see more operating system and multimedia-related scripts in a future edition.

Dayley offers you a useful Python aid. Deliberately written to be concise, and assuming that the reader already knows some Python. You cannot or should not use this book to learn the language.

But once having some acquaintance with Python, the book can help. It's not a dictionary of Python commands. Rather, Dayley thought of likely tasks you'll often need to do. He then supplies explanations and code snippets. The tasks include getting a given file from a tar file, or making a dictionary (hash table), or making a MySQL database. The snippets are typically less than 100 lines, and get the job done.

I've keep this at my desk for a couple years because it's has valuable snippets of code that are quicker to reference than random sites off a search engine. It's not comprehensive, and I don't think this was ever targeted towards new programmers, it's a reference for programmers new to Python, not new to programming concepts, and given its size, it doesn't have the space to explain the concepts.

In hindsight I've found most of the web section useless, even when using Python for a web backend language, although given the publish date, I'll forgive that.

My biggest problem is that, like all tech books, it's becoming obsolete. This book was written for Python 2.4, and there are a lot of valuable additions to the language, or third party libraries that have been released with 2.6 and 3 that supersede portions of code provided within.

If updated version for Python3 was released, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

I bought this book so I could look up definitions and examples while sitting in tight spaces with a laptop. For that purpose it is great. It's weak on language features lacking much depth or breadth. So once you get the hang of Python this will lose its value. But it is a good starter. Also to its credit it combines discussion of the language with code examples throughout the book.

As a tiny book it should probably be 4 or 5 stars, but I'll rate it as medium, 3 stars, as a pure Python reference. Nevertheless for a long while it resided in my bag as a quick reference while I got familiar with Python syntax.

A book like this is only useful as a reference manual into API areas your unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, after randomly using this book as a reference a few times I reverted to google.

Code examples are not complete, explanations are lacking, and overall I found little value reading sections of this book independently.

The authors should revise the book so each section stands on it's own without any information from other sections (sections will probably have to become slightly longer to do this / merging similar sections). The authors should provide a minimal *complete* script in each section that demonstrates the topic at hand and nothing else.

In it's current form, I do not think this book is worth the purchase price.

it is a good book for python beginner. in order to take step to next level, more python books need read.