Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- 24 Hours)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I bought this book hoping it would be a gentle yet thoroughintroduction to the Python language which I had hoped to use for webapplications. And the book started out along that track. Easy to read and lively and with lots of examples. The big problem I have with the book (and I only made it to hour 12 before I had to quit) is that there is no way for the reader to practice and learn the concepts in the book. There aren't any practice exercises or drills. There are screen dumps of code, but I didn't find the examples useful since I was looking for web-based applications rather than more mathematical types of examples. The examples also get very big and complex early on in the book. Experienced programmers will probably be able to follow along, but then they might not be buying this book in the first place. I'm still looking for a good, step-by-step way to learn Python.

What I like: - Easy to understand. The author did a good job. - Casual writing style. (You learn a thing or two about Zen.) - Includes enough ref info on its topics, but not too detailed/technical.

What I don't like: the editorial works. - Sample codes/output are presented as computer screen dumps. The color (gray scale) is hard to read, and characters are small. - The book description touts CGI as one of the book topics, but it's only covered lightly and briefly to add much value. - Chapter/hour 1 and 2 should be combined as 1. Too brief & too light.

...this book is garbage, and that's exactly where the book is now. In the garbage. The author needs to go back to school and get educated in the english language. He is very knowledgable in programming, he lacks the ability to put his thoughts in english that others can understand. He stops his thought half way through sentences. He has run on sentences, typo's, combined with the fact that he NEVER explains a single piece of code in the book completely, he famous lines in the book are "we'll discuss that later" which never happens, and "do you remember this?" NO, BECAUSE YOU NEVER EXPLAINED IT!!! Very frustrating, and i'm an undergrad student that has been punching out code in Java for 3 years, and I'm totally lost, how is that possible? 2 simple words for this book, don't bother. Get this book, it's much better: ISBN# 0-13-026036-3 - Core Python Programming by Wesley J. Chun

This book is OK. The author gets lost in his pastimes, such as Mayan culture. I didn't mind this though because I was entertained by his tangents. There is a better one, namely Learning Python (Lutz).

Although the book claims to be written for the novice programmer, I don't think it is really suited to such a reader. Throughout the book, the author introduces things without explanation. This is particularly a problem with the code samples. Most of the code in the book is taken from other projects that the author had worked on and is often not very illustrative of the points he is trying to make. Also, much of the code has parts that are unexplained. If I had not already been familiar with a few other languages, I don't think I could have followed this book at all.

Finally, although Python is often used for text processing tasks like sys admin, cgi, etc., almost all the examples in this book revolve around calendrical calculations. Maybe fascinating for the author, but agonizingly dull for me.

This book looked good when I started reading it, and even though I read through the whole thing and learned a few concepts about OO and Python it is definetly not a beginner's book. Hard to follow and the examples are basically all about mayan calendrical calculations. One thing i will say for this book is that the chapters on Tcl/Tk were quite good.

I have tried making my way through this book many times. But I cannot get past the author's incessesant penchant for the mayan calendar. I did not find any use in going through code snippets (which are very hard to read, they are screenshots in small font)that taught me how to manipulate dates (leap years, mayan calendars etc.) I found this approach extremely boring. Infusing text with an occasionally comment of marginal wit, does not make it entertaining.

The only redeeming portion of this book it that it does include a good introduction to Tkinter. I just wish someone with a better understanding of instructional writing had written it.

Like so many other Python books, does every introduction to subjects such as funtions, classes, objects and methods have to be about spam? I know where python got its name...but enough already!

You are better off reading the help and intro files at the python website than buying this book. There are numerous times where code is not explained and you have to figure things out more so than you would expect from a book that costs you money.
Though you can understand what the program does, the actual meanings of script and calls are left unexplained; this book lacks the precision needed to explain programming and obscures a simple and powerful language like python. This book could not possibly teach you python in 24 hours, nor will it do anything but confuse and frustrate the inexperienced programmer.

The book is very hard to read. It starts out fine, but the author seems to care more about Mayan calendars and Zen more than teaching Python to the reader. The first chapters about variable types don't give you anything much to practice on. The author says "a simple example" and doesn't explain parts of it until three chapters later. Other examples are in screen shots which can barely be read. Also annoying is the author's tendency to drift away from the subject and start talking about dead painters or other non-programming related topics. This book could use a lot of work

1. This book should be sold with a magnifying glass. Otherwise, the screen shots cannot be read. 2. When I buy a book about Python, I am interested in Python, not in what Guido (Python creator) has said or done. So, very frequent remarks "Guido this...", "Guido that..." are simply annoying.