First off, Learning Python shows the relationships among Python scripts and their interpreter (in a mostly platform-neutral way). Then, the authors address the mechanics of the language itself, providing illustrations of how Python conceives of numbers, strings and other objects as well as the operators you use to work with them. Dictionaries, lists, tuples and other data structures specific to Python receive plenty of attention including complete examples.

Authors Mark Lutz and David Ascher build on that fundamental information in their discussions of functions and modules, which evolve into coverage of namespaces, classes and the object-oriented aspects of Python programming. There's also information on creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Python applications with Tkinter.

In addition to its careful expository prose, Learning Python includes exercises that both test your Python skills and help reveal more elusive truths about the language.

The first two or three chapters are decent enough, and chapter 3 introduces you to the use of modules, and you're writing little programs that do something, and you're feeling good about things... But then the four chapters after that are little more than a geeks' list of features of the Python language (and what makes it different from or similar to C). There is not one single practical example of a program that actually does something useful. It's all just showing what each feature does at the command line. Utterly uninspiring...

And all the references to the C language - "this is a bit like arrays in C". Are you a beginner? Do you know C? Suppose not... Not for a beginner, at all.

And the Monty Python references... Well, if you didn't guess that this language was put together by Monty Python fans (in my naivety, I didn't), you'll know it after dredging through a chapter of this book. Every single example (that's the way it seems, at least) uses a string like "ni!", "always look on the bright side of life", "print 'dead' + 'parrot'", "I'm a lumberjack and..." OK, you get the idea. Please get a life, lads.

Or are you just trying to preserve the Python membership club as an exclusively "Geeks Only" institution?

I've given up on this book for now. Maybe there'll come a day when I'll wear a tee-shirt that says "SPAM", and I'll have nothing but praise, but If you're a beginner, and you want to save a bit of money, I'd suggest looking at Josh Cogliati's online tutorial. It's a PDF, so you can print it up nicely. He does little proggies that you can work through, and see what the POINT of the thing is. I don't suppose that he goes all the way with the thing (as he says at the end, he lost interest in writing more), but what he did do was pretty handy. No doubt there's quite a lot of other good stuff that you can find on the web. It's bound to be better than this totally unimaginative book. I guess that I'll just be learning as much as I can from Cogliati and other web sources, picking up the pocket reference book, and throwing this book in the same place that I put the spam.

Unless somebody wants to buy it off me? Ni!


Slow moving for those with previous programming experience.   August 5, 2005
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

If, like me and many other programmers, you are already somewhat familiar with C++ and Perl, you'll find this book slow moving. I would guess that few people start with Python as their first major programming language.

I'm about 40% through the book and we've only just covered function calls, and nothing OO. There's only been 4 or 5 new concepts so far that aren't identical to other common languages.

The author does go some way towards saying "this is similar to the C idea of ..." or "those familiar with C++ will recognise the similarities...". But what would be really useful would be a big bar next to the few concepts that are fundamentally different, saying "!!!Python Specific!!!" or something.

Having said that, there's few typos and the writing style is reasonable. I'd like to give it 3.5 stars really.


I started serious programming thanks to this book.   December 28, 2002
 10 out of 10 found this review helpful

I'm not at all a programmer. I had some programming classes in modula2 during my training in biotechnology and played a bit with BASIC but I didn't do any seriuous programming till I read this book.

I read the first chapters of this book, had the feeling I understood some, put it aside and came back later. At the second glance I had a "Aha" experience. I devoured the other chapters and now I'm really programming. I won't built a wordprocessor from scratch yet, but I'm able to use python (a very powerfull language) to solve realworld problems and help me maintaining a website, make a simple organiser and so on.

Thank you Mark Lutz and David Ascher for your book, thank you Guido van Rossum for the python language.