Customer Reviews
Good grounding in concepts, but needs more contextualising - By: Mr. R. Agnew, 26 Apr 2008 
I've been learning Python from this book now for a few months. The book is well written, it's clear & the authors 'take care' of the reader. However I doubt whether many total beginners (as I was & still am) are going to read this book & finish feeling that they can now go away & start to work out how to write a decent, simple program. The problem as I see it is that whilst there are good, well explained examples of what a FOR loop might be, & what you would be typing if you want to use functions, WHY you might be wanting to do this is often not covered. It's a bit like learning French by learning the punctuation, the alphabet, the pronunciation, & the vocabulary without knowing what the meaning of the words are, how they are used or how to make sentences. Many more examples of how one might display graphical output for budding gamewriters, or how one might use Windows style interfaces for those who want to write applications are needed for the content of this book to make sense. What is missing here is 'the point' behind learning to program. It's a very 'bottom-up' approach.
Having said that, this book is great for when you might need clarification on elements of Python, & as a general detailed resource on Python fundamentals.
NOT for beginners. - By: J. Scott, 07 Apr 2008 
While this book may be helpful to experienced programmers who are new to Python, it's emphatically not for those who are hoping to learn programming.
The authors claim that the only prerequisite for readers is that they know how to use a computer. Sorry, but this really isn't the case at all.
I don't think I'm a total beginner - In the past, I've had some experience of writing both games & business applications - but after a few weeks of trying to use this book, I've had enough.
Essentially, here's what to expect from the average chapter: 30 or 40 pages of dry as dust descriptions of various aspects of the language, mostly without any hint of why they are useful or important. The examples given along the way are mostly just 2 or three line of coding which still fail to give the slightest hint why the particular command is useful or worth remembering. Those who have previous programming experience will already know, but this is supposed to be a book for beginners, who will just be increasingly confused.
Finally, after all the many, many pages of explanations, you get a page or two of practical exercises. Alas, by this time the beginner has forgotten the reams of information already provided, having had no incentive to remember itin the first place.
My 2-star review is based on the fact that this book markets itself as being for total beginners. It isn't. If you are an experienced programmer looking to learn Python, this book MIGHT be for you. If you're a beginner looking to learn programming, this book has only one use: as a cure for insomnia.
Can that spam, please! - By: , 02 Mar 2006 
I'd like to balance out the reviews here by offering this book the minimum score. The book advertises itself as being appropriate for a first-time programmer, but honestly it's nothing of the sort, & I'm not even a complete first-timer.
The first two or three chapters are decent enough, & chapter 3 introduces you to the use of modules, & you're writing little programs that do something, & you're feeling good about things... But then the four chapters after that are little more than a geeks' list of features of the Python language (and what makes it different from or similar to C). There is not one single practical example of a program that actually does something useful. It's all just showing what each feature does at the command line. Utterly uninspiring...
And all the references to the C language - "this is a bit like arraysin C". Are you a beginner? Do you know C? Suppose not... Not for a beginner, at all.
And the Monty Python references... Well, if you didn't guess that this language was put together by Monty Python fans (in my naivety, I didn't), you'll know it after dredging through a chapter of this book. Every single example (that's the way it seems, at least) uses a string like "ni!", "always look on the bright side of life", "print 'dead' + 'parrot'", "I'm a lumberjack and..." OK, you get the idea. Please get a life, lads.
Or are you just trying to preserve the Python membership club as an exclusively "Geeks Only" institution?
I've given up on this book for now. Maybe there'll come a day when I'll wear a tee-shirt that says "SPAM", & I'll have nothing but praise, but If you're a beginner, & you want to save a bit of money, I'd suggest looking at Josh Cogliati's online tutorial. It's a PDF, so you can print it up nicely. He does little proggies that you can work through, & see what the POINT of the thing is. I don't suppose that he goes all the way with the thing (as he says at the end, he lost interestin writing more), but what he did do was pretty handy. No doubt there's quite a lot of other good stuff that you can find on the web. It's bound to be better than this totally unimaginative book. I guess that I'll just be learning as much as I can from Cogliati & other web sources, picking up the pocket reference book, & throwing this bookin the same place that I put the spam.
Unless somebody wants to buy it off me? Ni!
Slow moving for those with previous programming experience. - By: W. O. Smith, 05 Aug 2005 
If, like me & many other programmers, you are already somewhat familiar with C++ & Perl, you'll find this book slow moving. I would guess that few people start with Python as their first major programming language.
I'm about 40% through the book & we've only just covered function calls, & nothing OO. There's only been 4 or 5 new concepts so far that aren't identical to other common languages.
The author does go some way towards saying "this is similar to the C idea of ..." or "those familiar with C++ will recognise the similarities...". But what would be really useful would be a big bar next to the few concepts that are fundamentally different, saying "!!!Python Specific!!!" or something.
Having said that, there's few typos & the writing style is reasonable. I'd like to give it 3.5 stars really.
I started serious programming thanks to this book. - By: Guido Beelen, 28 Dec 2002 I'm not at all a programmer. I had some programming classesin modula2 during my trainingin biotechnology & played a bit with BASIC but I didn't do any seriuous programming till I read this book.
I read the first chapters of this book, had the feeling I understood some, put it aside & came back later. At the second glance I had a "Aha" experience. I devoured the other chapters & now I'm really programming. I won't built a wordprocessor from scratch yet, but I'm able to use python (a very powerfull language) to solve realworld problems & help me maintaining a website, make a simple organiser & so on.
Thank you Mark Lutz & David Ascher for your book, thank you Guido van Rossum for the python language.
