Learning Python: Edition 2

Mark Lutz · David Ascher

Dec 2003 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

Portable, powerful, and a breeze to use, Python is the popular open source object-oriented programming language used for both standalone programs and scripting applications. Python is considered easy to learn, but there's no quicker way to mastery of the language than learning from an expert teacher. This edition of Learning Python puts you in the hands of two expert teachers, Mark Lutz and David Ascher, whose friendly, well-structured prose has guided many a programmer to proficiency with the language.

Learning Python, Second Edition, offers programmers a comprehensive learning tool for Python and object-oriented programming. Thoroughly updated for the numerous language and class presentation changes that have taken place since the release of the first edition in 1999, this guide introduces the basic elements of the latest release of Python 2.3 and covers new features, such as list comprehensions, nested scopes, and iterators/generators.

Beyond language features, this edition of Learning Python also includes new context for less-experienced programmers, including fresh overviews of object-oriented programming and dynamic typing, new discussions of program launch and configuration options, new coverage of documentation sources, and more. There are also new use cases throughout to make the application of language features more concrete.

The first part of Learning Python gives programmers all the information they'll need to understand and construct programs in the Python language, including types, operators, statements, classes, functions, modules and exceptions. The authors then present more advanced material, showing how Python performs common tasks by offering real applications and the libraries available for those applications. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises that will test your Python skills and measure your understanding.

Learning Python, Second Edition is a self-paced book that allows readers to focus on the core Python language in depth. As you work through the book, you'll gain a deep and complete understanding of the Python language that will help you to understand the larger application-level examples that you'll encounter on your own. If you're interested in learning Python--and want to do so quickly and efficiently--then Learning Python, Second Edition is your best choice.

Ratings and reviews

Though I favor Perl moreso than Python, I still enjoy learning about it, and _Learning Python_ definitely made that task a joy. Like all O'Reilly publications I have encountered, _Learning Python_ is written in a straight-forward, informative, and entertaining manner, chock full of actual examples, and even informative exercises. If you want to learn Python, this is definitely the place to start (and O'Reilly has a book for just about every other facet of Python you care to know).

I should never have bought this book and I'm definitely returning it. Mark Lutz may be a great author, but he takes so terribly long to get to the meat of how to write any code that you'll fall asleep multiple times and wonder how anyone ever got anything done using this language. For all its glory of being OOP and so close to C++ that tools exist to migrate from Python directly to C++ classes, why does it take so terribly long to explain how to write a simple class? Where's the syntax explantion? Where's the functions? Where are the code samples? Someone needs to write Python for Perl Programmers, Python for C++ Programmers or even Python or PHP Programmers - ANYTHING that would compare some other modern day language, capable of forming classes or OOP constructs, and give us a demonstration of the differences so we can quickly begin to use this tool! Python has made some in-roads as being an excellent language and prototyping tool, but its definitely not a staple like Perl is and its incredibly obvious as to why! I'm wondering how its numbers compare to PHP - even in the CLI scripting world? Can we please please please get a book that will simple teach how to write code for this interpreter!? Instead of lumbering, ever so slowly, ever so drearily, ever so excrutiatingly-boringly into writing even the simplest code module!!!

how pays for python2?! it's obsolete.