Comments about oreilly Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition:

Python in a Nutshell 2nd Edition

Author Alex Martelli

Publisher O'Reilly ISBN: 0-596-10046-9

The author Alex Martelli is Uber Technical Lead at Google, Inc. Martelli holds a laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica from Bologna University. He wrote Python in a Nutshell two editions, and also co-edited the Python Cookbook. He's a member of the Python Software Foundation, and won the 2002 Activators' Choice Award. Martelli spent 8 years with IBM Research, earning three Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, and on.

The book is a great reference and full of insights and good programming techniques. It moves pretty fast to make a good introductory book, but once one has a reasonable understanding of Python fundamentals, anyone wishing to advance their understanding and application of the language can benefit from Python in a Nutshell.

I found that this book has been able to cover every thing from fundamentals of the Python language to a comprehensive description of some of the more esoteric newer language features and at the same time address many of the applications of the language. The presentation style is clear and very readable with concise examples, and not full of extraneous fluff. The subjects are well laid out beginning with a swift comprehensive introduction to the language, and a good description of the basic elements including classes, methods exceptions, modules, decorators and built-ins. There are sections on the Python library and extension modules, Network and web programming including some discussion of some of the existing python web frame works and socket programming. There is material on extending and embedding Python and alternate ways to extend python beyond c-extensions. The book was released just prior to the final release of Python 2.5, but there is considerable material covering most if not all of the latest 2.5 features such as the with statement.

I have found Python in a nutshell 2nd edition a valuable learning tool and reference resource and would recommend it for anyone interested in using Python to its fullest.

Reviewed by Max Slimmer user and proponent of Python since release 1.3.

Comments about oreilly Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition:

The text of this book is wonderful. I used the first edition extensively and the second edition expands to cover new material as necessary.

Unfortunately, the size of the index has been greatly reduced in the second edition, from 66 pages in the first edition to 19 in the second. This makes the index close to useless. Try to look up "list comprehension", for instance. I have resorted to scanning the table of contents instead.

Comments about oreilly Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition:

Python in a Nutshell is a excellent reference book, all python programmer must have one in the desk.

The online documentation for the python language is good, but some times is difficult to search for a feature of the language, in this book is easy to find anything about python.

This book complements perfectly the official library and language references, and covers almost everything you will ever need.

I Learn python with this book, but i only recommend the book for people with knowledge of other programming language, if you are new in programming and wants to learn python this book is not good for you (try Learning python by David Ascher and Mark Lutz), if you already have programming skills this is the perfect book for learn python.

The author explain the language in a very simple way with good examples, and don't wast time explaining the basics of programming, the book starts with a introduction to the python language, in chapter 2 the author explain the installation of various python interpreters, from chapter 4 to 9 the author explain the core of the python language, in the rest of the book the author cover the python library and extensions modules, network and web programming with python and in the last section the author talk about the various ways of embedding and extending the python language, in my opinion the book is well written and very easy to read.

I highly recommend Python in a Nutshell, for all programmers who wants to start coding in python, and for all python programmers as a language reference.

Comments about oreilly Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition:

I picked this up as it had great material on what had changed since I first got into Python with 1.5.2. Considering that the Zen of Python is barely being followed as the core language has feature upon feature heaped upon it, a book like this helps poor programmers simply wanting to use the language keep up with the changes.

I particularly like the section on the new object model, explaining the new __new__() method and summarizing the changes of subclassing object very nicely.

Still, Python changes so quickly that a book like this becomes stale very quickly. O'Reilly should likely offer some kind of upgrade program to stay current in cases like this.