| Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming |  | Author: Mark Lutz
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
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Rating:  154 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4th
Pages: 1216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.4
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 7.4 x 1.9
ISBN: 0596158068
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780596158064
Publication Date: September 24, 2009
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 154
 Must have been paid by the word July 15, 2010
HDBCoder
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this book because I was starting a job that required Python programming. In the past, I have always been impressed by the usefulness of O'Reilly's books. But now, I am boycotting O'Reilly because of this book. The book is physically enormous - almost too big to even read effectively. The book is verbose, chatty, and anecdotal - but does is spell out the language in a manner that a highly trained and experienced programmer can make use of - NO! I am still stunned at how useless this book has proven to be, and I get mad every time I see it on my desk. I have been unable to answer a single syntax question using this book - instead I go straight to the Python reference manual online. Save your money, and your bookshelf space for something you can either use or at least enjoy!!
 Too much spam; not enough real food to chew on. July 8, 2010
ErikTrips (San Francisco, CA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am only about a quarter of the way through this volume, and I am fairly certain that this is the worst O'Reilly book I have ever encountered. Most of their beginning programming books I have found quite useful, usually providing exercises that help me to think more like a programmer and get a feel for what sorts of things the code I am learning can do. This book, however, will have you printing endless, monotonous variations of "spam spam eggs and spam" at a prompt. I am quite fine with the occasional reference to where Python got its name, but the author of this book seems to think it an excuse not to bother coming up with any real code or problems that one might try to solve with code. I have even looked ahead to the advanced topics section, and the examples are still relying on printing permutations of spam, eggs, and the number 42 to "demonstrate" functions, methods, and even classes.
There are no exercises in this book at all. There are only the barest hints as to what one might use Python for. Each feature is trotted out, given some variation of "spam" or 42 to work on (if you're lucky, maybe you'll get 42.0: a float!), and then the reader is told to consult the Python documentation and "experiment." That's it. No suggestions as to what direction you might like to go with your experiments. Beginning programmers will find very little that will help them to write useful code here. I know enough about programming to know how some of the constructs being mindlessly presented might be used in the real world, but I will probably not continue using this book to learn Python. I would not recommend it to anyone: there is not enough information about the nuts and bolts of programming for a beginner. As someone who has coded a few actual applications, I simply find the endless stream of spam and eggs so mind-numbing that I cannot come up with my own practice problems. This is a book without an audience; I can't even believe the author enjoyed writing it.
Good for learning, but should contain more exercises June 24, 2010
J. Perenia
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was looking for a book to learn Python and this was one of the more recommended ones available at the time.
The first few chapters of this book are really interesting, but the author gets rather dry about 1/3 of the way into the book. I think that the author should have maintained that interesting tone through out the book instead of just letting it drop off after the first few chapters. However, I did enjoy the book and it proved useful in learning Python. Things I would probably do to improve upon it would be to add more chapter exercises. Compared to other programming books I've read, there aren't as many programming questions.
Really bad ! June 21, 2010
Ender Aydin Orak
I believed that so many people that write good reviews can not be wrong. But I was wrong, as everybody that write good reviews :)
First of all, I think author of the book has a prioritization and ordering issue. Any programming book that especially written for beginners has an ordering (data types, statements, expressions, collections etc.), but author mentions about every issue that comes in his mind regardless of being in an irrelevant chapter. For example, while mentioning about data structures in first chapter (and I think it should be a later issue), he mentions about operator overloading and garbage collection. And I think he can not handle the differences between Python 2.6 and 3.0 in a clear and tidy way. Expressing every difference between each release on every expression, structure or definition causes losing the focus on the real information. I prefer he would write the whole book on Python 3.0, cause anybody that buys this book now on would probably use Python 3.0 instead 2.6, and express really important differences on 2.6 in a separate section on each chapter for people that interested with them.
This book is really hard to read from start to the end. It immediately ruin your focus on the real subject with mentioning different and not so useful topics at that moment. I really tried it, but I couldn't continue to read and practice above 45 minutes.
I decided to continue with another book, and really do not recommend this book for anyone wants to learn Python.
Wordy and disappointing for such a well regarded text. May 23, 2010
Blue Cat (California)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book will teach you Python if you have a lot of patience and are willing to wade through many pages of text to get information. The author wastes a lot of ink stating things like "I'll introduce you to topic XYZ, but you will have to wait until a later chapter to go into detail." Or introducing a topic and then declaring it is outside the books (1216 page) scope. Here's an example from page 85:
"Text pattern matching is an advanced tool outside this book's scope, but readers with backgrounds in other scripting languages may be interested to know that to do pattern matching in Python, we import a module called re."
Pattern matching is a critical feature of any scripting language. I was surprised to see such an important topic thrown away.
The book is divided into sections. I've put page counts and a summary description of the content to further describe the glacial pace of the book:
Part 1: Getting Stared: Pages 1- 72
72 pages to tell you how to run a Python program.
Part 2: Types and Operations 73-258
186 pages to introduce Python types (strings, numbers, sequences, etc)
Page 3: Statements and Syntax - 259-392
If statements are not introduced until Part3.
At this point I gave up and started reading the online tutorial.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 154
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