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Buy Learning Python, Second Edition by Mark Lutz, David Ascher available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | Learning Python, Second Edition
by Mark Lutz, David Ascher
| | List Price: | $39.99 | | Price: | $28.00 | | You Save: | $11.99 (30%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 45632 | | Studio: | O'Reilly Media, Inc. | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 552 | | Publication Date: | December 31, 1969 | | Publisher: | O'Reilly Media, Inc. |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Portable, powerful, and a breeze to use, Python is the popular open source object-oriented programming language used for both standalone programs and scripting applications. Python is considered easy to learn, but there's no quicker way to mastery of the language than learning from an expert teacher. This edition of Learning Python puts you in the hands of two expert teachers, Mark Lutz and David Ascher, whose friendly, well-structured prose has guided many a programmer to proficiency with the language.
Learning Python, Second Edition, offers programmers a comprehensive learning tool for Python and object-oriented programming. Thoroughly updated for the numerous language and class presentation changes that have taken place since the release of the first edition in 1999, this guide introduces the basic elements of the latest release of Python 2.3 and covers new features, such as list comprehensions, nested scopes, and iterators/generators.
Beyond language features, this edition of Learning Python also includes new context for less-experienced programmers, including fresh overviews of object-oriented programming and dynamic typing, new discussions of program launch and configuration options, new coverage of documentation sources, and more. There are also new use cases throughout to make the application of language features more concrete.
The first part of Learning Python gives programmers all the information they'll need to understand and construct programs in the Python language, including types, operators, statements, classes, functions, modules and exceptions. The authors then present more advanced material, showing how Python performs common tasks by offering real applications and the libraries available for those applications. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises that will test your Python skills and measure your understanding.
Learning Python, Second Edition is a self-paced book that allows readers to focus on the core Python language in depth. As you work through the book, you'll gain a deep and complete understanding of the Python language that will help you to understand the larger application-level examples that you'll encounter on your own. If you're interested in learning Python--and want to do so quickly and efficiently--then Learning Python, Second Edition is your best choice. |
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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 114 reviews)
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(3rd. ed.)Best way to learn Python 
I used to say that there were several good books for learning Python. You just had to browse them and choose what works for you. Not anymore. This third edition, along with coverage of Python2.5, adds dark tabs for the exercises at the ends of most chapters, and I think that many people can now learn the language by just trying the exercises and comparing with the answers in the back. The sidebars are interesting. The tables are clear. The examples are instructive. The typesetting is well-chosen. Despite all the materials availabe free on the web, this book is worth the price.
June 26, 2008 | |
Get the Learning Perl book authors to write about Python 
I've been wanting to learn Python for a while. Hearing that the 3rd edition of Learning Python had added "exercises", I ordered it. It was a mistake.
The book winds its way through each facet of the language one by one, making no attempt to integrate what you are supposed to be learning into a working, functional solid.
The exercises consist of simple parrot questions: "Name the four major components of the module search path." Even the major exercises are childish. After the chapter "Advanced Function Topics", write a function which prints its single argument. Then try passing it more than one argument, or no arguments, to see what happens!
The code examples are never more than five lines, usually initialization of a variable, then a toy operation on that variable, with in-line comments taking the place of actual demonstration. A particularly choice tidbit comes when the author demonstrates making user-defined classes adopt the iteration protocol. He gives as an example a class which iterates over a predefined series of square numbers, then finishes the section with a note to the effect that such a simple procedure should really be programmed using a list comprehension.
The author constantly urges the reader to try things in interactive mode, but he doesn't give much of an idea what to try. Of course the reader can make up exercises, or rewrite a old program, which is what I have resorted to, using this book as a reference manual, but that's hardly ideal. The author is an expert on Python, and I don't know anything yet; he should be directing my exploration of the language, not just handing me an atlas.
I give this book credit for completeness and for clarity of explanation. The author lays out language features and tells you how they operate in a way that is easy to grasp. What he fails to do is to get the reader coding and actually using all the bits of the language, so that actual work can be done. He notes that the creator of Python has a mathematical background, which accounts for the consistency of the language design. It may also account for the lack of practical instruction.
June 21, 2008 | |
Python is easy - well...
Python has the reputation to be a language that is easy to learn. Well, why do you need a book more than 500 pages to only learn the language then? The answer is that even if you can learn the basics very fast, it has a lot of bells and whistles that can take time to master.
This book covers only the language not the libraries, but covers it very well. Highly recommended reading once you'll want to use the language to write something bigger than a script of 10 lines.
4 stars only because I would have expected some exposure to the standard libraries as well for a book called "Learning Python"
May 09, 2008 | |
I'm not impressed 
I'm talking about the 3rd edition. It's the first book about Python that I read, so I can't make a comparison. It may be just the best first book out there, but I'm not impressed. The book reads like a draft, not a book in its 3rd edition. The author just keeps repeating himself on minor points in subsections back and forth. It's 700 pages long, but I wish it were half the length, after cutting needless elaboration and repetition. Perhaps the older editions are more concise. On the other hand, we readers may not have a choice.
May 03, 2008 | |
The Longest Short-way to Python 
If you are a top-down learner this book is not for you. You can safely pick "Dive into Python".
However, if you are the bottom-up type, you will not regret. While the Python slogan promises "one way to do it", Mark Lutz will show you four, and explore every detail, like complex list comprehensions, closures and the diamond inheritance pattern. This is why you will wait 200 pages (exploring data types) until the introduction of the first Python statement, and 200 pages more for the first script.
But if you cross the details, you will get excellent understandings of the core Python logic, which will save you countless debugging hours in the future.
The OO part alone worth the entire book. It's going from the very basics of OO programming up to elementary design patterns and some advanced OO implementation issues in Python.
One last caution: although 600 pages, this book should be really read cover to cover. It's a true tutorial, which gradually develops the major concepts (sequences, assignments, references, objects, namespaces etc) from the ground up, with (midterm?) exercises. Give yourself a few hours to really learn, exercise your brain (and fully grasp 100 ways to silently override your variables with namespace mistakes). It's a great book.
April 23, 2008 | |
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