Jython Essentials (O'Reilly Scripting)

Rating:
Summary: Superb summary of CPython 2.2 features
Review: For someone who's been working in Cpython 1.5 thru 2.1, the 1st 5 chapters are an excellent, succinct language refresher and intro to new features in 2.2: nested scopes, generators, etc.

This book does assume pretty solid grounding in python. If you don't have that, start with:

Chun: Core Python
Lutz: Learning Python
or Harms/McDonald: Quick Python

Rating:
Summary: Informative, but poorly presented
Review: I found the book to be informative in learning JPython, but it seemed to have ignored the most practical use-cases for JPython, light scripting and unit testing, and kept suggesting JPython as an alternative for working in Java. In addition, I felt the book was poorly (or boringly) written and that the authors failed to draw on any significant amount of experience in writing the book.

I would have preferred a book that wrote of JPython as a scripting language for Java and that offered advice on how best to leverage JPython for this purpose. I recommend taking a hard look at the other titles before purchasing this one.

OK, I'm adding a paragraph to this review after owning the book for a few weeks. It IS a very helpful book and I'm raising my rating from 2 to 4 stars. Perhaps I was thrown off at first by the succinctness of the text, but I've come to find that it makes it a great reference book. I'm already a half-way experienced programmer and do not need the filler and the explanation of concepts that thicker books probably provide.

Also, there is a helpful section on unit testing which I'd missed (It wasn't placed very well in the book) and python is a flexible enough language that someone should be able to figure out different ways to unit test without the section.

Rating:
Summary: Good language coverage, but awkward.
Review: This text has good coverage of the language features, but the presentation and organization is poor. If you're a Java developer looking to pick up jython quickly, I'd suggest "Jython for Java Programmers" instead.