Tuple index

[Scott Robinson]

On 21 Feb 2005 15:01:05 -0800, "John Machin" <sjmachin at lexicon.net>
wrote:

>
>Steve M wrote:
>> John Machin wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > Steve M wrote:
>> >> I'm actually doing this as part of an exercise from a book. What
>the
>> > program
>> >> is supposed to do is be a word guessing game. The program
>automaticly
>> >> randomly selects a word from a tuple.
>> >
>> > Care to tell us which book is using a tuple for this, but hasn't
>got to
>> > lists yet?
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > John
>>
>> Python Programming for the absoulte beginner by Michael Dawson
>
>In a review I found on the web:
>http://www.skattabrain.com/css-books-plain/1592000738.html
>"Dawson will take you by the hand and lead you down the garden path."
>
>Malapropism? Intentional humour?

The book teaches you enough about programming and python to get you
programming.  It was the only python book in my local library so I
read it while trying to learn the basics of python.  It got me to the
point where I could comfortably write Fortran-style python (I am not
claiming that anyone else will leave the book that way, only that was
as far as I had progressed in understanding python).

I think that this book suggests using pickle/unpickle to send data
over the internet.  This is an amazingly bad idea, which is obvious
once you understand how overloading works (I'm pretty sure overloading
isn't covered in that book).

In short, I think that this book is a good introduction to
programming, and it will explain the basics of python, but it doesn't
really begin to explain how to program in python.

Scott Robinson