Customer Reviews

Python Programming in Context

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

 

 

This book is written for Python 3.0. But as you might know 3.0 isn't the "recommended" version. I'm using 2.5.x yet I can follow codes in this book line by line and it'll still work (except in finger countable cases). So that isn't that big of an issue.

The book goes into details like background information or just a quick description of what's going on. My instructor says not many programming books bother with details.

Additionally this book quite easy to follow. All codes in the books are boxed in, indented properly, and if python shell is being used it is indicated so. In chapters where the books describes "methods", they provide us with nice tables listing all "methods" learned in the chapter, code to use it, and an explanation on what it does. They do similar tables for other stuff like "modifiers".

My favorite thing possibly is what they did with exercises. Exercises follow up after each sections in a chapter. This allows me to work on each sections at a time. Furthermore, at the end of the chapter, they provide with a quick "Summary", list of "Key Terms", "Python keywords", "Bibliography", and "Programming Exercises" that involves everything in the chapter!

The book is also a walkthrough cTurtle. cTurtle is a drawing module for Python; you can download it for free from their website. I personally skipped part involving cTurtle but I suppose it is worth mentioning in the review as cTurtle consumes a good deal of the book.

P.S. the book has some weird (or maybe it is funny) chapter titles as "Your Father Was a Rectangle", "Bears, Fish, and Plants, Oh My!

Jan 2010 edit: I'm looking at some other book, and this book is outrageously expensive compared to the rest. It has ~ 500 pages and is worth ~ 100 $ i.e. 1 dollar per 5 pages. If you're trying to pick-up a self-study book, get a far come comprehensive book for a cheaper prince, like [Learning Python (Animal Guide).

This book can provide a basic understanding of Python. As with most books of this type there are errors and lack of clarity due to versions of the software used. One of the frustrating bits is that there are some examples that shown that require specific modules to be installed and no mention is made that a typical user would have to perform those tasks. This happens in Chapter 1 when a novice user would not realize that type of issue.

This book is really helpful. It's very reader friendly. The only thing, is that I can find this information on the net anyday. Nonetheless, this textbook is comprehensive and not hard to understand.

Had to purchase this book for an introductory class on Python.

This book does a less than stellar job of introducing Python concepts. It takes the approach of encouraging learning by doing, but the examples are at once too detailed and too broad... while it walks you through the examples, the examples themselves seem arbitrary and overly complex for an introduction. While still learning about loop iteration, for example, you are thrown into complex data analysis, while still perhaps grasping at the fundamentals of the language and struggling to parse many lines of code.

Exercises are provided periodically in each chapter, but they are often vague busywork. The great challenge in these exercises is not so much in completing the exercises per se, but just figuring out what the exercise wants you to do. Sometimes the exercises are easy, but sometimes they are overly difficult and too complex for the payout received. This makes budgeting your homework time all but impossible.

In the abstract, the examples in the book presumably provide a decent overview of computer scientific concepts. The book covers a lot of ground. Although I get the intent here, to open students' minds with broad exposure, it's like getting hit over the head with theory. I don't come from a mathematics background, for example, and this proved a serious detriment in this book, as the authors evidently expect everyone in an introductory course to have a firm grasp of mathematical concepts. Thus, the book glosses over issues which stopped me in my tracks, while spending a lot of time on things which I found pointedly dull and irrelevant.

While source code for the book is available online, often the datasets used in the examples is not... thus, sometimes you are able to complete exercises by manually typing the datasets from the book (an aggravating process), while sometimes (like in chapter 7), the source datasets are completely unavailable. In these latter cases, who knows what you're expected to do.

All in all, I found this book very frustrating for a beginning python text.

Received this textbook quickly and it was in excellent condition. I have no complaints.