Book recommendation please

[Geoff]

On Sun, 03 Nov 2002 19:14:51 +0000, Alex Martelli wrote:

<snip>
> 
>> I have seen Gupta "Making Use of Python" advertised.  It is recent and
>> looks
> 
> Haven't seen that -- but I made the mistake of purchasing "Making Use of
> Ruby", from the same series (by Mahadevan, while the Python one is by
> Gupta), and it's probably the worst small book I've bought in many years
> -- full of technical mistakes, non-idiomatic and sometimes
> almost-incomprehensible use of English, and so forth; I was appalled
> that John Wiley, once quite a reputable technical publisher, could have
> sunk so low.  Quite apart from the author's problem with English and
> technical concepts, technical reviewing and copy-editing SHOULD have
> caught all of those problems; the fact that the book went out of the
> door in that state is, to my way of thinking, sufficient to advise
> people against buying ANY other book in that series (one MIGHT happen to
> be good, if the author's a demigod needing no technical reviewing nor
> copyediting, but the gamble's just too wild, given that there are so
> many other good, *well-reviewed, well-edited* books on the market).
> 
> 
Thank you very much for writing such a detailed and helpful reply.  I will
take Gupta off my list I think.

>> good.  I would be grateful for any views as to which of the two I
>> should go for.
> 
> If you're in a hurry and can't wait for the Python 2.2 version of
> "Learning Python" (sorry, I can't forecast when it might be ready), I
> think you would be well advised to look at other books yet.  If you're
> interested in other technologies to be used side by side with Python
> (such as relational databases, networking, XML, ...), then Holden's "Web
> Programming With Python" (New Riders) is very good, as it gives you just
> the right amount of grounding in those other technologies as well as
> Python.  Another good alternative is Magnus Lie Hetland's "Practical
> Python", by Apress -- lots of very substantial, fully worked-out
> examples there.

For the moment at least, I am learning simply because I want to.  I am in
a hurry only because I am enthusiastic.  I don't have a project in view,
but experience shows that once I begin to understand a language a suitable
project will come into my mind. I have spent the last couple of years of
free-time converting to linux and learning enough rudimentary C to work
out why some application I download won't compile.  I would now like to
reconnect with programming and do something more creative.  The silly
thing is that I had this preconception (left over from C64 days I guess),
that any worthwile language must be compiled and I did not pay any real
attention to python until I read a little more about it a few weeks ago -
since then it has been fun all the way :-)

> Be warned -- I'm biased, having been a technical reviewer for both books
> (only for the first half, i.e., examples excluded, in the case of
> "Practical Python"), and being friend with each of the two authors (each
> kindly reciprocated my reviewing, by serving in turn as technical
> reviewers for my "Python in a Nutshell")

That is the kind of bias I like.

Regards,

Geoff