Great Python books for the beginner

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:12:19 -0800 (PST), bruno.desthuilliers at gmail.com <bruno.desthuilliers at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 jan, 21:04, Landon <projecteclip... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> One thing I wonder about is the examples these books use to teach the
>> concepts. I found myself really attached to K&R because the end of
>> section projects were utilities that I would find be able to find
>> useful in day to day work such as a version of wc and a program that
>> would take collapse all consecutive whitespace in a document into one
>> space. I could just use the projects from K&R, but I imagine a Python
>> book would have a better selection that highlight Python's abilities.
>
> It wouldn't make any sens to port the K&R stuff to Python - different
> languages, different uses, different problems... I mean, C is a low-
> level language, mostly useful for low-level system programming, while
> Python is a very high level language mostly useful for application
> programming and Q&D scripting.

I tend to ignore exercises, sadly, but back in the days before Perl,
and on Unix, it was useful to write small utilities like that in C.
Maybe the K&R exercises reflect that.

(And the 'K' in K&R became the 'k' in awk, so these people were
clearly very interested in this application area -- and interested
in easier ways to do it than by C programming.)

  Unix bigot mode: it seems to me to be harder and more tedious to
  learn programming in a GUI environment like Windows. On Unix small
  home-grown filter-like programs are useful: you have a good shell to
  run them in, and you have a wealth of other utilities to connect
  them to via pipes.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@        Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
\X/     snipabacken.se>          R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!