I would advise against buying this book.
It was written by a 'Zed A. Shaw' and I have to say that I am now convinced it falls into the category of 'trying to teach someone something one does not know'.
He starts out insisting the 'student' must get familiar with command line operations. Recommending 'Power Shell'. And he stated do not use an 'Integrated development Environment' named 'Idle'. I've been using Idle for a few years now, and it hasn't failed me yet.
If one has some familiarity with programming in general, and some python experience AND one is just looking for some relatively simple programs to use to refresh and drill one in many different aspects of Python, the book will do that.
But for a new 'wanna-be-programmer' this book is NOT the answer.
One of the sample programs has one doing simple 'file processing'. As in, open a file, read a line out of it, do something with it, and maybe write it to another file. He used a technique called 'recursion' to do it. Recursion is where ones function calls itself. Slick yes? For small files slick and cool. Try working in the real world with hundreds to thousands of lines in the file and that 'trick' will crash the machine. (If you must know, ask me and I'll explain why.)
He also suggested one not use 'while' loops. I suspect because he never really figured out what and how while loops actually do. But, for processing files line after line for hundreds to thousands of lines the while loop is the way to go.
Python does object oriented programming. That is some really cool stuff. Remember Decomposed's 'racing turtles'? With Python and object oriented programming that was a short, simple little program. I can see clearly (now) how and why OOP can be used effectively . . . but it is abundantly clear that Zed does not.
Just my opinion here folks . . . feel free to ignore this posting.
Zim.
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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