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Python in a Nutshell
Written by my favorite author and Pythonista, Alex Martelli, this book manages to fill three roles in extremely pleasing fashion. First and foremost to me, it is a great read, straight through. Mr. Martelli's prose is always sparkling and always keeps the reader interested. No matter how many Python books you have read, you will learn some nuances from this book, and it is about the best review of the whole Pythonic subject matter that I can imagine. While there is absolutely no fluff whatsoever in these 636 pages, it still makes for rather easy reading because the explanations are so clearly thought out and explored as to lead one gently to understanding, without in any way being verbose. It is obvious that Alex Martelli took his time and put in sufficient thought, effort, and intellectual elbow-grease to make this work a classic for all time.
Secondly, this book is the ultimate Pythonic reference book, the best fit to this role I have yet seen. You will keep this book in the most cherished spot on your book shelf, or else right at your side on your computer desk, because you can almost instantly find any topic on which you need to brush up, in the midst of a programming project.
Third, Python in a Nutshell is the most up-to-date book on Python (as of April 2003) and includes the best and most complete expositions yet on the new features introduced in Python 2.2 and 2.3. These topics are not only covered in depth, they are integrated into the text in their proper positions and relationships to the language as a whole. They are explained better here than I have seen anywhere else, so much so as to make them not only understandable to me (a duffer), but indeed so that they appear seamlessly Pythonic, as if they had been a part of the language since version 1.0. Topics explored in depth include new style classes, static methods, class methods, nested scopes, iterators, generators, and new style division. List comprehensions are made not only comprehensible but indeed intuitive.
The book is surprisingly complete. It covers the core language as well as the most popular libraries and extension modules. It is difficult to choose any one portion of the book to highlight for extra praise, as all topics are treated so well. It is a complete book, the new definitive book about Python.
Everything about this book speaks of quality. In addition to the top notch writing and editing, O'Reilly really did the right thing and published this book printed on the highest quality paper, paper so thin that the 636 pages are encompassed in a book much thinner than one would expect for such a size, but strong enough to resist wear and tear. The text is most pleasing to the eye. Holding the book, and turning its pages, gives one a feeling of satisfaction.
Any job worth doing is worth doing well. Alex Martelli and O'Reilly have done justice to a topic dear to our hearts, the Python programming language. Perhaps, in years to come, the passage of time may make this book to be no longer the most up-to-date reference on the newest features added to Python. But time can not erase the quality craftsmanship and the shear joy of reading such a well thought out masterpiece of Pythonic literature.
You can purchase Python in a Nutshell from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Ron Stephens would also like you to check out Python City, with "27+ reviews of books about Python. 67+ links to online tutorials about Python and related subjects Daily newsfeed of Pythonic web articles, new sourceforge projects, etc."
I've been using Python for a few months now. I hope people won't mind if I post a shopping list of what seem to be missing features in the language, and ask if there is a way round them.
- Python has 'break' and 'continue' like C. But these only affect the innermost loop. Is there a way to break out of an enclosing loop? (In Perl you can label a loop and then say 'next LABEL', etc.)
- Failing that, is there a way to get goto statements in Python? They can sometimes be an elegant way to express something, contrary to popular myth. (Eg tail recursion.)
- How can I pass a variable by reference? For example, to take a reference to a string, pass it to a function and have that function modify the string passed in. More generally, is there a way to store references?
- Python advertises its support for first-class functions, but I can't seem to get closures to work. The 'lambda' keyword won't accept assignment or even sequencing inside the function body. So anonymous functions you might want to pass around can't do much beyond trivial operations. You can get around this to some extent by making named functions in every case and passing those around, but even then they don't seem to act properly as closures, picking up variables from their local scope. (I'm using Python 2.2.1 BTW.)
- Is there a do/while statement in Python? Plain 'while' is there but occasionally an 'at least once' loop is what you need. Is there an addon package or library for Python that provides a 'do' construct?
As you may have guessed, these are the things I really miss in going from Perl to Python. The cleaner syntax isn't a big enough payoff for going without some fairly important language features. The project Vyper sounded very promising in its attempt to add real lexical scoping and functional programming features to Python, but it doesn't seem to be active any longer. A real pity. In the meantime, where I have a choice, I'll keep using Perl, despite its syntactic oddities and historical baggage.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
best. post. ever
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My career was going no where until Gentoo, now I get a job offer a day, at least. My programmer friends look at me with new respect. They know I have taken the right step, and that they soon will too. As for Python, I am convinced it is less powerful than XLANG, which I do everything in now, since it supports dynamic macros and XML. Thank you slashdot!