TBR writes “Most books that aim to teach a programming language take an all-encompassing approach in that they assume that the reader doesn’t know how to program at all. So in a text on Java or whatever you’ll get basic material on looping, control flow, what a variable is and so on. For anyone looking to pick up on a second (or third or fourth…) language there’s a lot of stuff to skip through to get to the real meat.
There’s no such problem with Mark Pilgrim’s ‘Dive Into Python’. This is a book (or web site or PDF file) for those readers who just want to, well, dive in. Structured around a set of language topics (data types, introspection, objects, file and exception handling etc), the book takes a decidedly hand-on approach, using small programs and code snippets to show how Python gets things done.
For the absolute beginner there are a couple of very introductory chapters which cover installation and the bare bones of writing code. However once the shock of using indentation to block code has passed it is pretty much straight into real problems and real topics.
Read the rest of the review at TechBookReport“
Link: techbookreport.com
Category:
- Python
