Python Cookbook: I misunderstood

[Wayne Folta]

Just a note for people who, like me, might misunderstand the idea of 
the Cookbook. I've seen such things in the past (for Perl, etc) and 
thought they were basically books of algorithms for people who didn't 
know how to do certain common programming tasks. So I just blew them 
off, since I've been programming for 20+ years.

But I got the Python Cookbook and have been very pleasantly surprised. 
A wonderful book. The recipes are more an exploration of the idioms of 
the language. Lots of great insights that would take a long time to 
discover on your own, during which time you might've ended up doing 
perl-ish (or lisp-ish, or C-ish) python.

They also address efficiencies and details in python which are 
independent of the algorithms themselves. (I.e. is map faster than 
comprehension, is python's sort stable, etc?)

A very fun read. Found a couple of typos so far, but they don't ruin 
anything. I was worried that they were not up to the latest python 
release, but they always mention 2.2 where appropriate, so that's fine.
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