Will "Python in a Nutshell" be too short?

[Steve Holden]

"Hamish Lawson" <hbl at st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote ...
> O'Reilly doesn't yet list the forthcoming "Python in a Nutshell" by Alex
> Martelli, but according to Amazon.com's page for the book, it will have
400
> pages. Is that indeed the plan? I know that O'Reilly aims to keep fat out
> of its books, and that Alex is striving to be comprehensive yet concise,
> but I worry that the book's proposed length will simply be too short to
> cover the material I'm hoping will be included.
>
I wil be very surprised if Alex' book does not become the canonical
reference for the language, since his treatment is exceptionally thorough
and (even for him) more than usually precise.

> I regularly consult David Beazley's "Python Essential Reference", but the
> usefulness to me of this otherwise excellent book is compromised by the
> number of (platform-independent and not obsolescent) standard modules and
> packages that had to be left out of the book's 380 pages (htmllib,
> telnetlib, urllib2, CongigParser, unittest, tkinter, xml, etc.).
>
They clearly aren't "Essential" :-)

> Many of us were hoping that "Python in a Nutshell" would not only be a
> comprehensive reference of pretty much all of the modules in the standard
> library that aren't obsolescent or platform-specific, but would also cover
> some of the most popular third-party libraries - e.g. DB-API, PIL,
> mxDateTime, Numeric, win32all, wxPython, mod_python, ReportLab.
>
The omission of some material that particular readers consider desirable is
more or less inevitable, given the different requirements we all have of
this single language. Just the same, I'm sure you will be impressed by what
they *have* found space to include.

> My congratulations to Alex and O'Reilly if they reckon they can somehow
> manage to fit this all into just 400 pages; but if this won't be possible,
> as I worry must be the case, then may I make a plea for the book's length
> to be reconsidered. It would be good to have a one-stop Python reference
> book that would be a suitable companion to the task-oriented "Python
> Cookbook" - I'm hoping "Python in a Nutshell" can still be that book.
>
It's far too late into the production process for such pleas to be
effective, no matter what the individuals concerned may think of their
merits. It's probably at the printers already...

> By comparison, O'Reilly's "Perl in a Nutshell" is 800 pages and has the
> following chapters: Introduction to Perl; Installing Perl; The Perl
> Executable; The Perl Language; Function Reference; Debugging; Packages,
> Modules, and Objects; Standard Modules; CGI Overview; The CGI.pm Module;
> Web Server Programming with mod_perl; Databases and Perl; XML and Perl;
> SOAP; Sockets; Email Connectivity; Usenet News; FTP; Lightweight Directory
> Access with Net::LDAP; The LWP Library; Perl/Tk; Win32 Modules and
> Extensions; OLE Automation; ODBC Extension for Win32.
>
Guess you'll just have to wait and see ...

regards
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Steve Holden                                  http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                 http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/
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