Editorial Product Review:Item Description:Portable, powerful, and a breeze to use, Python is ideal for both standalone programs and scripting applications. With this hands-on book, you can master the fundamentals of the core Python language quickly and efficiently, whether you're new to programming or just new to Python. Once you finish, you will know enough about the language to use it in any application domain you choose. Learning Python is based on material from author Mark Lutz's popular training courses, which he's taught over the past decade. Each chapter is a self-contained lesson that helps you thoroughly understand a key component of Python before you continue. Along with plenty of annotated examples, illustrations, and chapter summaries, every chapter also contains Brain Builder, a unique section with practical exercises and review quizzes that let you practice new skills and test your understanding as you go. This book covers: Types and Operations -- Python's major built-in object types in depth: numbers, lists, dictionaries, and more Statements and Syntax -- the code you type to create and process objects in Python, along with Python's general syntax model Functions -- Python's basic procedural tool for structuring and reusing code Modules -- packages of statements, functions, and other tools organized into larger components Classes and OOP -- Python's optional object-oriented programming tool for structuring code for customization and reuse Exceptions and Tools -- exception handling model and statements, plus a look at development tools for writing larger programs Learning Python gives you a deep and complete understanding of the language that will help you comprehend any application-level examples of Python thatyou later encounter. If you're ready to discover what Google and YouTube see in Python, this book is the best way to get started.
Amazon.com:The authors of
Learning Python show you enough essentials of the Python scripting language to enable you to begin solving problems right away, then reveal more powerful aspects of the language one at a time. This approach is sure to appeal to programmers and system administrators who have urgent problems and a preference for learning by semi-guided experimentation.
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.
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Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
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Good for beginners, the python docs can do equally good
Like my title suggests, if you have programming experience and you do not mind or have little trouble reading the Python documentation in a online fashion then its probably not absolutely necessary that you have to buy the book.
However, the author is very good in instilling the nature of Python programming and he's good at getting you to think about the concepts but this book is definitely not a cookbook. Last thing is that it doesn't concentrate on the GUI nor library usage etc as it's mission is simply to teach you about the core of Python
Customer Rating: 
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Great book!
This book is great! Good writing, good exercises. Good for people who have some experience in programming. If you have never had any contact to other languages or logic, consider studying some introdutory topics before reading this book.
Customer Rating: -
Great introductory book
This is a really good introduction to Python. It is very clear, accessible and has quite a lot of substantial content. It does not get into the really deep details, but that is OK because if it tried to the book would become overwhelming. On the other hand, unlike some python books it is not so light and superficial to be good for newbies only. I think this is a great starter book on Python.
Customer Rating: -
This topic will be covered later in the book
"This topic will be covered later in the book" is the phrase most often encountered in this book.
Funny - but even on page 593 (out of 635 where appendix begins) we still see "we'll meet such an example in Chapter 28".
It seems like if you take out all the phrases that promise you to explain things in the rest of the book, the book itself will thrink 1/4 of it's size. Why do I even need to be told that you will cover it later in the book - I ASSUME it will be covered if you mention it. If not - refer me to some other resource.
The phrase above is just an example of the writting-alota-words-to-fill-up-space style. The legacy seems to have been carried forward into programming python by the same author on which I am working now.
Unfortunately this seems to be the best book in it's class, and there really is nothing to compare it to (considering it covers python2.5).
Even though I was done with the book in few weeks, I would still have preferred a more concise and to-the-point text.
