Python 2.0 book

[Alex Martelli]

"Sergo" <badman718 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:uI87MbEHAHA.322 at cpmsnbbsa09...
>     I recently became interested in learning Python and just ordered
> "Learning Python", "Python Pocket Reference" - O'Reilly, and "Python
> Essential Reference" - New Riders.

Good choices (if your eyesight is good enough for the "Essential
Reference"'s smallish typeface).


>     Now I've learned that with Python 2.0 release, a lot of changes are
> going to be made to the language. So I'm wandering, should I return
> those books and wait for something more up to date and just stick to
> online tutorials and references, or are they still relevant to the 2.0

They're quite relevant.  Everything you learn from them will remain
true, except that maybe a few times they may say "you can't do that"
while actually in 2.0 you can.  Python is a very stable language,
having a long history behind it: it just doesn't undergo earthquakes
from one version to the next -- it evolves slowly, smoothly, and
quite incrementally.

About the 1.5.2 -> 2.0 transition specifically, I doubt that a newbie
will see the improvements as particularly crucial to him, with one
major exception -- the distutils, that make it deliciously easy for
you to install extensions if the author has used distutils to package
them; that will be very relevant once a lot of distutils-packaged stuff
begins to be out there.  But it doesn't invalidate anything you learn
on the books you've ordered -- just makes your life easier later on.

Similarly for the other enhancements -- XML support, Unicode, new
syntax for augmented-assignment, list-comprehension, and (yecch!)
print-to-file.  Once you've got the basic language stuff under your
belt, some of these may be very important to you, if your work a lot
in those niches (XML is rather a large and growing "niche":-), but,
again, nothing you learn now on these books should break anyway.


> release? I also read that with the future 3.0 release, its going to
> change so much that it will basicaly be a new language (true or not?).
>     So I am confused about the books.

There is a dream out there for a future "Python 3000" that will be
a completely new language, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon,
so, don't worry!-)


Alex