what would you like to see in a 2nd edition Nutshell?

[Alex Martelli]

I'm considering proposing to O'Reilly a 2nd edition of "Python in a
Nutshell", that I'd write in 2005, essentially to cover Python 2.3 and
2.4 (the current 1st edition only covers Python up to 2.2).

What I have in mind is not as complete a rewrite as for the 2nd vs 1st
edition of the Cookbook -- Python hasn't changed drastically between 2.2
and 2.4, just incrementally.  Language and built-ins additions I'd of
course cover -- decorators, custom descriptors (already in 2.2 but not
well covered in the 1st edition), importing from zipfiles, extended
slicing of built-in sequences, sets, genexps, ... and also major new
standard library modules such as (in no special order) optparse,
tarfile, bsddb's new stuff, logging, Decimal, cookielib, datetime,
email... and new capabilities of existing modules, such as thread-local
storage.  Outside of the standard library, I was thinking of expanding
the coverage of Twisted and adding just a few things (numarray --
perhaps premature to have it _instead_ of Numeric, though; dateutils,
paramiko, py2app...).  Since the book's size can't change much, I'll
also have to snip some stuff (the pre-email ways to deal with mail, for
example; modules asyncore and asynchat, probably) to make space for all
of the additions.

I haven't take any real decisions about it, yet, except one: I'll keep
covering Tkinter, rather than moving to, say, wxPython (no space to
_add_ wx coverage while leaving Tk intact - having to choose, I still
believe Tkinter coverage is going to help more readers).  Just about
everything else is still to be finalized in my mind...

So, if there's any advice or request about a 2nd edition of the
Nutshell, this is the right time for y'all to let me know.  Feedback is
welcome, either privately or right here.  Thanks in advance -- _and_
apologies in advance because I know I just won't be able to accomodate
all the requests/advice, given the constraints on book size &c.


Alex