Python Books & improving PyAwareness - How to ?

[Michael Hudson]

"Jason Cunliffe" <jasonic at nomadicsltd.com> writes:

> Hello
> 
> I am very happy to see the new Python books appearing. Some good titles and
> all the new ones I've picked up are excellent [Quick Python, The Essential
> Python Reference and Python-Annotated archives]...my sincere thanks to
> their respective authors.
> 
> I imagine that most people shooping for Pyhton books will tend to follow
> the links from www.python.org pages and purchase through amazon.com or
> similar.
> 
> Meanwhile, I have been making an ad-hoc survey in the New York City
> bookstores over the holiday. Sad to say there is a very low profile of
> python books there. Only a couple of copies at best in most
> stores

To play a different tune, I went book shopping in London the other day
and was quite astonished at the number of Python books I found.
Blackwell's had a couple, Waterstone's had quite a few and Border's
had loads.

Happy days.

Except that I was looking for Lisp books. Oh well. (Border's had PAIP
- which is out of print - but for £52. Ouch.)

> ...compared to shelf-fulls of the other P and J lanaguage books. Even
> worse [but perhaps significant] is that in most stores the Python books
> were extremely oddly placed - sometimes a volume or two in the multimedia
> section, sometimes a tome in Internet, somtimes a copy wher you would
> expect it a thte end of the Perl shelf. In no store did I find all the
> current published Python books together. 
> 
> I noted that ther was no Python books in Linux sections - which I think is
> rather surprisin and dissappointing, especially given the enthusiasm now
> for Linux sections in these stores.

<gripe> 
I can never find technical books in bookstores. It's the ridiculous
over-categorisation that gets to me. On this day in London I found
shops that had separate sections for "Pure Mathematics" and for "Logic
and Set theory". I mean, what?

I'm not sure you can do much better than alphabetical order by author
surname, and that sucks too. But less.
</gripe>

of-course-I've-never-needed-a-book-on-something-as-simple-Python-ly
y'rs Michael