O'Reilly Learning Python

Great side book for universal python programming with lots of python content. It also happens to be one of the best of its kind, good deal.

Lo consiglio ad ogni persona che voglia iniziare seriamente a programmare in Python, purché abbia già un background di conoscenze riguardo ai concetti base di programmazione, come cicli, programmazione orientata agli oggetti... non è una guida per principianti, è una chiara e completa guida per programmatori.

After going through several tutorials, and trying other books. I have found this one to be the best way to start learning the python language, -- at least for me. I need to know the why and the how something works, not simply type this, do that. This book gives an under the hood look at the why and the how of python to get you started and whet the appetite. Granted for some the first three chapters will seem slow in developing, but the explanations are clear and exact. There is a little of the "you will learn this later" as one hears in any algebra class about calculus, but the author delivers on that statement. One additional thing, I appreciate the author not taking the role of cheerleader as others have about the various languages out there; that being how awesome python is and bad the other languages are, he simply lays out what python can do, and how it can integrate or be integrated with other languages, and operating systems. All around I enjoyed the candor and the quality of the presentation, and the nuts and bolts of python which I think is integral to being a great developer, no matter the language.

Warum können nicht alle so schreiben wie Mark Lutz? Ok, das Buch ist sehr lang, es richtet sich aber an Programmieranfänger und erklärt wirklich einfach wie Python tickt. Es wird auch erklärt warum Strings vor Listen eingeführt werden und erklärt sehr genau was man mit Strings als machen kann. Dafür ist der Abschnitt über Lists kürzer, da schon vieles im Kapitel über Strings erklärt wurde. Man wird natürlich als erfahrener Entwickler schonungeduldig, wenn Mark Lutz in Kapitel über Lists Iterationen anschneidet und dann auf Kapitel über Iterationen verweist. Trotzdem kann ich es unbedingt empfehlen, weil der Stil von Mark einfach toll ist. Wer eine gute und detaillierte Beschreibung in Python sucht ist hier gut aufgehoben.

OK, that's an obvious title, but given the subject matter can you blame me?I've programmed using many languages over the years, from Pascal to BASIC (various dialects) to C (again, more than one dialect) and various shell scripts though in recent years my programming output has dropped to the occasional bit of korn shell and a little bit of COBOL. So this is a toe in the water of something that's a little more recent.My first encounter with Python goes back to the days when I discovered that BitTorrent, the popular peer to peer sharing system, was a Python program but that my own main desktop at the time, namely Miyuki, my Acorn Risc PC, didn't appear to be running a version despite the fact that RISC OS, even back then, had Python capability. At the time, however, I didn't really have much time to muck around with it, especially as RISC OS back then wasn't exactly up to speed with the various libraries needed to get something like BitTorrent going, though I believe that has changed on more recent systems.So what is Python? Well, the opening chapter goes into some detail about what it is. To put it as concisely as I can, it is an interpreted computer programming language, something along the lines of what BASIC used to be but a lot more powerful and elegant than the old FORTRAN spinoff. Because it is interpreted, it can be run immediately though it can suffer with speed issues as the computer has to run the code through the interpreter to make sense of it, but what you have is something that is more readable on the human side than some compiled programs like the aforementioned C or COBOL.I've only just started on this book so I can only give you a rough idea about it. This book is about teaching you how to construct programs. It's a big book (about 1200 pages) but it doesn't really get into the actual uses of Python. That's covered by the followup book "Programming Python" though if you are an old programming hand, chances are that you will have your own ideas about that!