Learning Python 5ed

What an excellent and fully document book for starting Python. I do have Python in a Nutshell, but decided I needed to start a little earlier in the sequence. This is a huge book (some 1600 pages) and it is clearly written with lots of tips and repeated warnings of beginners mistakes. It is based on lectures given by the author and feedback from the students. I am proceeding by leaps and bounds and find the code examples excellent. One can, of course, skip any which one does not need to do. I read it on the train to work (despite its size) and find it possible to practise the exercises when I get home. Python is simpler to learn than C or C++ and the structure of the objects is natural. If only I'd structured my exam question as clearly!

I like the book, enjoying it a lot, right about chapter 9 or so; although it is dense and it needs time to digest. Pros: - Very in-depth for 2.x and 3.x, really like how the author tackles subjects. - Clear examples and goes in depth in all of them. - So full of information that I feel I learn more than expected. - Excellent as a reference as well. - Excellent to learn how things really work in python, not a tutorial, not a simple guy, an in-depth killer book. - Good set of quiz questions and also exercises. - Good value for money. Cons: - Can be slightly dense. - Some things are not extremely necessary and going too in-depth can cause the reader to think "when are we writing some code? c'mon". Buy it, have it on your desk.

After reading 1000 pages of the book I think book is very good. As a data analyst with just a little knowledge of Java and basic OOP concepts I found this book have everything beginner need to start programming in Python. When I started to learn Python I used some web tutorials, but this book gives me better understanding of things and I have really learned a lot from it. Lot of people see the size of the book as the downside, and I have to say it is depressing, but on the other hand I think see that as a benefit because book cover everything beginner need to learn to start to do some real quality programming, and I don't have to search for another sources. Anyway I don't think programming can be learned in one week after reading a 300 pages book, and shorter books don't cover this many topics. There is a lot of repetiton in the book which for me personally is not bad because I see them as a reminders and if the topic is something I feel I really understand I simply skip it. The only thing I don't like is that book's code which can be downloaded from publishers website is a complete unorganised mess, and poorly referenced in the book. So most of the time when I want I can't find the example code there, which make it completely useless. So, if you have time and want to learn Python I recommend this book, but if you have a short deadline or you don't have a lot of patients you should definitely skip it.

First of all this book is massive - it's the thickest paperback book I've ever seen! Despite its huge physical size the high quality print and binding work very well to keep the book usable. As a computing/radio hobbyist I've found this book to be an excellent Python tutorial. Having read it in its entirety I now find the book to be a very useful reference to get me back up to speed when I start a programming project. If you want to move on to more advanced Python Mark's Programming Python makes a great companion to this book.

This is the very basic (and heavy) book for everyone interested in Python. The text is very thorough but still easy to read. There are also many questions and exercises to keep up the learning in case one wants to also code instead of only read it through.

Great book that works as a reference to the language. I find the book perfect when I need to dive deeper under the hood of Python. I do all my personal projects in Pyton3 but still use Python 2.6 at work (CentOS 6.4). The book does a good job comparing both Python versions. In my opinion invaluable at your desk and pdf version in your laptop.

This is a great reference book for your Python journey. The book is structured in a way that covers a high-level insight into aspects of the language and then provides a more in-depth look into topics should you wish to go deeper into something.

The first thing that strikes you about this book is that it's big. 1500 pages big. Big enough that physically handling the book is inconvenient. Upon reading it, you'll see that much of the size comes from repetition. Many of the chapters present alternative ways to do the same thing, often using this technique as an explanatory device; yet somehow, the author manages the doublethink of continually repeating the Python "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" mantra. The order in which the material is presented is wrong. The book explains Python's basic types before its syntax; this means it's 300 pages in before you can actually start writing code that does anything. It's 473 pages in before the concept of a function is introduced; even if this text was written for those who had done no previous programming at all, this seems bizarre. Obviously the sections on types have to talk a little bit about syntax and functions (otherwise you wouldn't be able to say anything about what those types actually do in the first few chapters), which is yet again a recipe for repetition. Exercises are few and far between. There are "quizzes" at the end of each chapter, but they're very simple, knowledge-based questions which don't require you to write code. Programming is learned by doing, so you'll need to invent your own projects to do if you want to learn with this book. If you can ignore the structural defects, the book is beautifully written at the detailed level, and the code examples are of a high standard. It is highly readable - you won't need to continually re-read to understand what's going on - but the repetition means you will find yourself skimming or skipping large sections of the text. The book is a broad overview of a vast language; it is not a detailed API reference, and doesn't have examples of every possible API call. And neither should it be; all that stuff is online. It does explain the concepts well and give you an insight into why Python has evolved to be the way it is. However, if you're an experienced programmer looking for a quick way to break into the Python world, you might want to look for something a little more concise.