Dive Into Python

Rating:
Summary: A great read!
Review: This is one of the best practical programming books I've read in a while. Pilgrim combines interesting examples--not too trivial, not too involved--with crystal clear explanations. I learned a lot of interesting stuff about XML and SOAP that I didn't know before (not to mention Roman numerals) and it was entirely painless! The chapter on regular expressions is not to be missed.

This is not a book for Python beginners. If you haven't done any Python programming before, but are an experienced program, I'd read the excellent tutorial chapter in Beazley's Python Essential Reference (it shouldn't take more than half an hour) and then proceed to Pilgrim's book.

I do have a few minor complaints. Pilgrim has a fondness for and/or constructions that cause me headaches everytime I see them. (Personally, I think it's a defect of the language that "x or y" is equal to either x or y. Hey, Guido, why not just support the ? : ternary operator?) The chapter on refactoring is weak and the example of unittest seemed artificial to me. Also, I could have used a few less language dialect examples. But this book is so much better than any of the other language books I've read in the last few years, that it seems ungrateful to complaint about minor defects.

Rating:
Summary: Great choice for a Python-newbie
Review: This was my first foray into Python. That is, beyond what I had picked up from random articles on the Web over the years. As more or less a complete newbie to the language, I most certainly valued the approach employed and I constantly had those little thoughts like "this is the way a programming language should be taught".

Now what is this approach I'm praising here? In short, it's the good ol' get-your-hands-dirty-quick method of diving head first into actual, meaningful code to figure out what it does, why it works, and thereby figuring out new language features a couple at a time. For example, on page 11 you don't get a list of reserved words in Python or a brief history of how one programming language lead to another, but instead you get a code listing for a little program that takes a dictionary and constructs an ODBC connection string out of it. Simple? Yes, but much more interesting than seeing the syntax for a for-loop. Throughout the book, Pilgrim shows you how to use Python in parsing strings, processing XML, evaluating regular expressions, calling web services, and what not.

"Dive Into Python" is not a reference you can turn to with any Python question imaginable. Instead, it's a very effective tutorial and overview of what (and how) you can do with Python.

Rating:
Summary: Many virtues of Python
Review: Today's programming world has a multitude of languages to choose from. One recent up-and-comer is Python. Why? Mark Pilgrim gives a forceful presentation of its virtues.

Veterans of other languages will see here a reimplementation of many nice features of several languages. For example, C++ has its Standard Template Library. And the default Java installation comes replete with an extensive library. So too does Python. Pilgrim covers examples of key libraries in various chapters. Like one that knows HTML and another than can parse XML. So you don't have to go back to writing grungy low level code. And writing an XML parser is very tricky to get right. Java and C# programmers have also found introspection to be vital for writing more flexible and modular programs. So that one class can dynamically find another class's methods at runtime. Guess what? Python lets you do this too.

Python is also fully object oriented. Not bad for a 'mere' scripting language. Unlike some others, that are just weakly OO.

The style of the book is example-driven, with carefully chosen examples that introduce key sections of Python. In some way, like a bottoms-up approach. Pilgrim is forthright about the presentation; deliberately eshewing a more elegant, theoretical layout. Very nuts and bolts.