Book Recommendation

[John J. Lee]

Anthony <sysfault at secureb0x.net> writes:

> Hello I'm currently trying to read Core Python Programming, but by the
> looks of it im never going to get done the book is about 860 pages long
> real intimidating, but im guess im going to have to stick in there. have
> any of you ever read it? is it a good book? if not what do you suggest i
> read. Please help me i'm eager to learn :)

I'd say read the stuff on language issues, skim the stuff on libraries
&c. (assuming that's what fills all those pages?), then ditch the book
and just write some code.  You just need to have read enough to have a
good mental map and some basic knowledge -- at that point, reading
without doing becomes an inefficient way of learning.  Then come back
to this newsgroup and c.l.py.announce, read other people's code, read
the rest of the book and articles on the web, experiment with
libraries, etc.  That's what I did when learning Python (in sharp
contrast to C++, which scares me enough that I read several books
before writing a line of code...).


John