best book: aint no such thing, and encouragement for old coots

[John Benson]

Hi, I see a lot of posts asking about "the best Python book." In my
experience, there is no such thing, but there are a lot of good books that
will help you along in different ways, and at different times.

First of all, I'd like to clarify my position on learning: I subscribe to
the adobe hacienda school of autodidactic technology, to wit:

"If you throw enough adobe at the side of the hacienda, some of it will
stick"

At one time or another, I've dipped into the various O'Reilly Python books,
Grayson's Python and Tkinter Programming, and Christopher's Python
Programming Patterns. They're all good, but I need to see the same difficult
or complex thing presented various times in various contexts to really get
comfortable with it. Hence the multiple viewpoints of multiple books, and I
will also read an individual book more than once, interspersed with other
volumes. Enough adobe ends up adhering to my mental hacienda so that I can
accomplish things in Python.

And now, some encouragement for old techies who have considered going into
management with writing cool software is enough:

My formal education in data processing stopped with Advanced Data Structures
back in the eighties, and I coasted along doing journeyman programming in
various COBOLs, Cs and proprietary languages. Of course, I stayed reasonably
current with stuff like Dijkstra's Structured Programming, DeMarco's
Structured Analysis, Date's Relational Database and other flavors of
business software technology which were my stock in trade, but otherwise I
avoided the paradigm of the week. Then I ran into Python about two years ago
and all of a sudden there was OOP, functional programming, aspect-oriented
programming and other stuff that I had maybe heard about but hadn't actually
worked with, all staring back at me from the pages of Python books and the
mailing list. It's been pretty much a process of creative destruction:
starting all over, but from a higher and clearer conceptual vantage point.
And, of course, I didn't really forget all the other stuff, I just pushed it
into the background long enough to get a new appreciation of it from this
new point of view. In summary, I'd like to recommend getting into Python as
a rather easy and fun way to talk the talk and walk the walk nowadays; it's
been a very rewarding and refreshing software engineering update.