Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Think Python

Posted by michael on from the because-thinking-perl-hurts-too-much dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a neverending effort to spread the word about free quality online programming books, here is a Python programming book. 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python', by Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Jeffrey Elkner is a copylefted work available in multiple formats at Green Tea Press: HTML , PDF, LaTeX. Compliments of the online books what's new page."

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Dive Into Python by jonwiley · · Score: 4, Informative

    Another excellent free book for Python is Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim. It is available in HTML, PDF, Word 97, Windows Help, plain text, and XML formats.

    This book has plenty of examples and pointers to further reading on each subject. It features good layout, use of colors, and typography which makes for easy reading and comprehension.

  2. Re:Where are they ? by JonahC · · Score: 4, Informative
    You can go here to get a list of all the available versions in the "How to think like a computer scientist" series:

    http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCS.php

    I was actually quite surprised to find this article on slashdot. You see, I'm the author of the Perl script which converts the LaTeX source to HTML. I hope nobody finds any blatant problems with the online book websites...

  3. a review by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've written a review of this book on The Assayer. The book is self-published (the authors run Green Tea Press), and one of the things people don't realize about self-publishing is how hard it is to attract reviews. (Actually, it's hard in ordinary publishing, and even harder in self-publishing.) Without reviews, you don't get much credibility. So if there's a free book in The Assayer's database that you've read, please write a review!

    --
    Find free books.
  4. Re:Computer 'Science'? by hysterion · · Score: 4, Informative
    Those are hard things to tell an Caltech Alumnus :-)

    No doubt, Feynman was a very, very good physicist. But he was also a genius at self-promotion, and his cult has gone way overboard as a result. It's well-established by now that some of the ideas he's famous for were first published by others.

    (Not that he wasn't honest about it sometimes. I think he's on record, for instance, crediting Stueckelberg for the renormalizion of electrodynamics, and for the idea that positons are electrons travelling backwards in time. See e.g. this timeline, or the last chapter of this book.)

    --
    Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes