At 8:05 am -0700 17/8/99, CURTIS David wrote:
Newbie Question:
I am trying to learn Python and would like any input on books and tutorials to aid in learning. Thanks in advance for any knowledge!
Online Stuff:: http://www.python.org is the place to go - get the downloadable documentation and try out the tutorial. An *invaluable* online quick-reference sheet is http://starship.python.net/quick-ref1_51.html As to books:: I have the O'Reilly pocket reference (very useful), the Big Book by Mark Lutz (very readable, very big) and the Internet Programming book by Aaron Watters and Guido van Rossum (Pythons author). The Big Book and the AW&GvR book both have CD's. hth tone. ------ Dr Tony McDonald, FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888 Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2
At 16:39 17/08/99 +0100, you wrote:
I am trying to learn Python and would like any input on books and tutorials to aid in learning.
The best Python book today is "Internet Programming With Python", both for beginners and advanced users. It starts with an excellent overview and proceeds to cover the hows and whys of the language very authoritatively. The authors are some of the foremost Python gurus, including Aaron Watters and Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. IMHO, "Programming Python" is too verbose and has too many bad jokes (bad jokes tend to be more distracting than good ones, for some reason). Because of its sheer volume, it must make a lot of people think that Python is much more complicated than Perl, since "Programming Perl" is about half its size. "Programming Python" beats IPWP in one area: Tkinter programming (a topic that is not relevant to Zopistas in general). "Learning Python" is short, but also tends to get lost in distracting details. It has one chapter that is very helpful for beginners: "Common Tasks is Python". That is one of the two sample chapters O'Reilly has in their web-site. Check it out at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lpython/chapter/ch09.html The "Python Pocket Reference" is useful, although it lacks an index. The tutorial by Guido van Rossum available at http://www.python.org is also a good starting point. Python is easy to learn, consistent and readable, so one book should suffice, and reading lots of source code is the way to mastery. Best regards, Luciano Ramalho
The "Python Pocket Reference" is useful, although it lacks an index.
Actually, they made an index after the fact: http://www.ora.com/catalog/pythonpr/inx.html Even with that, though, I must say that the pocket reference is a disappointment. The whole purpose of the book - quick reference info - is defeated by the incompleteness of the information, lack of page headings, and random organization. New Riders is working on an "Essential Python Reference" that I'm kind of looking forward to. Not sure when it will be out, though. jon Jonathan Corbet, Eklektix, Inc. corbet@eklektix.com
participants (3)
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corbet@eklektix.com -
Luciano Ramalho -
Tony McDonald