Programming Python: Object-Oriented Scripting

click here for more details, find new or used items	Mark Lutz, Laura Lewin, Frank Willison Our price £35.05 (£38.95) New from £8.42 Used from £3.73 Pages: 1292 (Paperback) ISBN: 0596000855 Pub: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Pub date: 2001-03-01 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 406493

Editorial Review:

Later sections show how get Python to work with C, Java (through JPython) and other languages. The book concludes with useful reference sections summarising key aspects of Python, such as its revision history, relationship to C++ and other material. There aren't many titles on Python, and fans of this up-and-coming language are lucky to have such a solid tutorial and guide available in Programming Python. Perfect for those with just a little previous exposure to the language, it's all you need to master Python in depth and tap its considerable power for virtually any software project. --Richard Dragan

Reader Reviews:

bloated and useless (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book is 1552 pages, and weighs 2.5 kgs. Despite that, nearly every single attempt I've made to look something up in the index has met with failure. Much of the bulk of the book comprises several chapters devoted entirely to python scripts the author has written and clearly feels very proud of. Screen shots, full source code listings, the works. Sadly none of it is of any great educational value.

For much of the rest of the book he relentlessly vomits up the usual unending stream of tired old Monty Python lines, interspersed with his own wildly hilarious observations like "use the Source, Luke!", "I am lost at C" and, most unforgivable of all, "Roses are Red, Violets Are Blue; Lists Are Mutable, and So Is Set Foo". It's like he copied all his section headings from t-shirt slogans on sysadmins at a beer festival.

I was fortunate enough to have pretty much every book on Python going bought for me by my company, and whilst Lutz is by no means the worst offender, he does have by far and away the lowest signal to noise ratio. To be fair it's not all Lutz's fault, and O'Reilly's relentless nosedive into medicrity is to blame. In the old days, he'd have been edited mercilessly and been given a decent index, and a reasonably useful 400 or so page book would have resulted. As it is, the reader is left to do that job themselves from Lutz's raw materials.

A good resource of limited usefullness to the python experienced. (12/12 people found this helpful)

The first disappointment of this book is its win32 approach. It focuses all the examples on execing within a stiff windows environment and does little to orient the scripts to a linux shell. This would be acceptable, were the book providing insight into python programming not freely available on the internet.

The modules being discussed are, for the most part, the well documented std libs which come with python version 2.2. Most of the high-level features of the language are ignored: Packaging modules, Class inheritance models, and general process control (including exceptions).

In my experince, this book should include a disclaimer stating that it teaches basic programming tricks in a python context, and doesnt offer advanced python techniques.

If you are an intermediate to beginner script writer and would like to advance your python skills, this is a good book for you. If you are an advanced programmer looking to streamline python code or transition to python this book should be overlooked. For those of us able to wade through a long library reference it would be preferable to visit the online docs of your python version; it will be much more intuitive and up to date regarding the exotic usage or advanced manipulations the language offers.

good for beginners (2/7 people found this helpful)

A good book for beginners... and contains enough to keep you going for a long while...

NOT Python's answer to Programming Perl (23/26 people found this helpful)

I bought this book by its title, expecting it to be the Python equivalent of Programming Perl (the best programming book I've ever read), I was suprised to find it was so different. The book is basically a run through of a vast array of example programs (all provided on the CD-ROM bundled with the book) which Lutz has written for various tasks (CGI, TKinter GUI building, sysadmin). He spends 1200 pages running through the main Python library modules and how he has applied them to these tasks. Some of the programs are quite impressive (an e-mail client for example), and Lutz is clearly making good use of the language.

This is not a reference book _at all_, you'll need the online docs or another book for that, but surely such a huge book could have made room for _some_ reference material. I was also very shocked when I opened up the book to find Lutz was using Windows to demonstrate program output (I always thought O'Reilly were on _our_ side). In the end I did enjoy reading the book, but I think that is probably because Python is such a good language to learn and use.

The definitive Python book for experienced programmers (9/10 people found this helpful)

I had been keenly looking forward to the second edition of this book and I haven't been disappointed. Some criticised the first edition for being rambling, but the second edition is now much more focused. It is targetted at experienced programmers with a knowledge of Python, and has a wealth of useful material that shows the uses to which the language and its libraries can be put.

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