"definitive" source on advanced python?

[Alex Martelli]

vdrab <stijndesaeger at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you.
> 
> The original question was not meant to sound particularly arrogant, and
> as you point out
> a book covering ONLY things like metaprogramming would probably be
> pretty useless in its own way. 

There's a niche market for such books -- "Putting Metaclasses to Work",
for example, an out-of-print book that's about a funky dialect of C++,
did influence the design of Python's new object model, since Guido read
it at just the right time.  But, the book IS out of print and the
language it describes is dead, which are cautionary signs;-).

> I have been using python on and off for
> about a year or so but still find myself staring at some of the funky
> recipes at the aspn cookbook site, not knowing which way is up.
> A good reference seems to be hard to come by, hence the question.
> Thanks for the link, I will have a look at some of the material.

You're welcome!  Besides the 2nd edition of the Nutshell, for which you
should not hold your breath (it's months away yet), and the
presentations on my site, there's a fair amount of material in the 2nd
edition of the printed Cookbook -- we put a immense amount of work into
selecting, discussing, explaining, *and* shoring up the recipes
presented there, most particularly the "black magic" ones (look
especially for the two chapters whose introductions Raymond Hettinger
wrote, both the introductions and contents are quite instructive).  But,
the Cookbook is mostly about examples/uses of language and library
feaures, not a *reference* to them.


Alex