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Google and YouTube use Python because it's highly adaptable, easy to maintain, and allows for rapid development. If you want to write high-quality, efficient code that's easily integrated with other languages and tools, this hands-on book will help you be productive with Python quickly -- whether you're new to programming or just new to Python. It's an easy-to-follow self-paced tutorial, based on author and Python expert Mark Lutz's popular training course.
Each chapter contains a stand-alone lesson on a key component of the language, and includes a unique Test Your Knowledge section with practical exercises and quizzes, so you can practice new skills and test your understanding as you go. You'll find lots of annotated examples and illustrations to help you get started with Python 3.0.
Mark Lutz is the world leader in Python training, the author of Python's earliest and best-selling texts, and a pioneering figure in the Python community since 1992. He is also the author of O'Reilly's Programming Python, Python Pocket Reference, and Learning Python (all in 4th Editions). Mark can be reached on the web at www.rmi.net.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ton'o-reading,
This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
This book is quite easy to read yet a very comprehensive study of the Python language, discussing both 2.x and 3.x releases when necessary, which have enough differences that this has to be done. You could be a complete novice at programming and still get be able to use this book, but it is also detailed and in-depth enough to challenge experienced programmers learning this amazing language. There are both quizes and programming assignments do do. Well worth the money. Be prepared to be reading this book for quite a few weeks....
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
2.8 out of 5 stars (38 customer reviews) 79 of 83 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Wordy and disappointing for such a well regarded text.,
By Blue Cat - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
This book will teach you Python if you have a lot of patience and are willing to wade through many pages of text to get information. The author wastes a lot of ink stating things like "I'll introduce you to topic XYZ, but you will have to wait until a later chapter to go into detail." Or introducing a topic and then declaring it is outside the books (1216 page) scope. Here's an example from page 85:"Text pattern matching is an advanced tool outside this book's scope, but readers with backgrounds in other scripting languages may be interested to know that to do pattern matching in Python, we import a module called re." Pattern matching is a critical feature of any scripting language. I was surprised to see such an important topic thrown away. The book is divided into sections. I've put page counts and a summary description of the content to further describe the glacial pace of the book: Part 1: Getting Stared: Pages 1- 72 72 pages to tell you how to run a Python program. Part 2: Types and Operations 73-258 186 pages to introduce Python types (strings, numbers, sequences, etc) Page 3: Statements and Syntax - 259-392 If statements are not introduced until Part3. At this point I gave up and started reading the online tutorial. 47 of 52 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Too much spam; not enough real food to chew on.,
By ErikTrips - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
I am only about a quarter of the way through this volume, and I am fairly certain that this is the worst O'Reilly book I have ever encountered. Most of their beginning programming books I have found quite useful, usually providing exercises that help me to think more like a programmer and get a feel for what sorts of things the code I am learning can do. This book, however, will have you printing endless, monotonous variations of "spam spam eggs and spam" at a prompt. I am quite fine with the occasional reference to where Python got its name, but the author of this book seems to think it an excuse not to bother coming up with any real code or problems that one might try to solve with code. I have even looked ahead to the advanced topics section, and the examples are still relying on printing permutations of spam, eggs, and the number 42 to "demonstrate" functions, methods, and even classes.There are no exercises in this book at all. There are only the barest hints as to what one might use Python for. Each feature is trotted out, given some variation of "spam" or 42 to work on (if you're lucky, maybe you'll get 42.0: a float!), and then the reader is told to consult the Python documentation and "experiment." That's it. No suggestions as to what direction you might like to go with your experiments. Beginning programmers will find very little that will help them to write useful code here. I know enough about programming to know how some of the constructs being mindlessly presented might be used in the real world, but I will probably not continue using this book to learn Python. I would not recommend it to anyone: there is not enough information about the nuts and bolts of programming for a beginner. As someone who has coded a few actual applications, I simply find the endless stream of spam and eggs so mind-numbing that I cannot come up with my own practice problems. This is a book without an audience; I can't even believe the author enjoyed writing it. 37 of 43 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Really bad !,
By Ender Aydin Orak - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming (Paperback)
I believed that so many people that write good reviews can not be wrong. But I was wrong, as everybody that write good reviews :)First of all, I think author of the book has a prioritization and ordering issue. Any programming book that especially written for beginners has an ordering (data types, statements, expressions, collections etc.), but author mentions about every issue that comes in his mind regardless of being in an irrelevant chapter. For example, while mentioning about data structures in first chapter (and I think it should be a later issue), he mentions about operator overloading and garbage collection. And I think he can not handle the differences between Python 2.6 and 3.0 in a clear and tidy way. Expressing every difference between each release on every expression, structure or definition causes losing the focus on the real information. I prefer he would write the whole book on Python 3.0, cause anybody that buys this book now on would probably use Python 3.0 instead 2.6, and express really important differences on 2.6 in a separate section on each chapter for people that interested with them. This book is really hard to read from start to the end. It immediately ruin your focus on the real subject with mentioning different and not so useful topics at that moment. I really tried it, but I couldn't continue to read and practice above 45 minutes. I decided to continue with another book, and really do not recommend this book for anyone wants to learn Python. |
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