Book "python programming patterns". anybody read this??

[Gordon McMillan]

Roy Smith wrote:

> Gordon McMillan <gmcm at hypernet.com> wrote:
>> I am a long-time Pythoneer and a very long-time programmer, and I had
>> to study many of the examples carefully before understanding how they 
>> worked. 
> 
> I havn't seen the book, but I have to wonder about the above.  Over the
> 25 or so years I've been programming, I've gradually shifted my
> priorities from elegance, cleverness, and efficiency, to simplicity and
> ease of understanding.  We do a lot of code review at work, and I'm
> always the guy at the meetings arguing for rewriting it so it's easier
> to understand. 
> 
> It seems to me that if somebody is experienced in both algorithms and
> in the particular language a program is written in still has to study
> the code carefully to figure out what it's doing, it's probably not
> very good code. 

The book is terse and dense with information. Personally, I like that. 
There's many a 800 page computer book with 20 pages of information. By the 
end of the book, the example code has implemented multi-threaded undo / redo 
- able transactions against a dbm type storage. The hardest thing to follow 
was his (highly efficient) implementation of an algorithm for computing 
whether one set is a subset of another. So it's not for people who don't 
like low-level stuff.

-- Gordon
http://www.mcmillan-inc.com/