2.3 Programming in Python 3, Mark Summerfield

I only get credit for about 1/3rd of this book because I didn't finish it and I don't think I ever will.

We're thinking of doing development in Python 3 at work. For those who don't know, Python is an object oriented scripting language that has had a lot of people saying nice things for some time now. And Python 3 is the absolute latest version thereof.

Interestingly, Python isn't neccessarily compatible between major versions, and since we hadn't been using much Python before, we decided to go straight to the latest. Given that I didn't know Python at all, I went looking for a book specifically about Python 3, and this was the only one I could find.

What a waste. I'm a reasonably good programmer, and this is a terrible book. It can't be used as a reference, so forget that. His examples and overview stink too, though, which means that newer programmers who need more to get the gist of things are out of luck as well. I was over 100 pages into it, for example, before I ever saw anything that showed how to open and read from or write to files.

At this point I've resorted to the documentation on python.org. If you're considering Python, I suggest you do the same and give this book a wide berth.

My husband (also a programmer) always seems to like the O'Reilly reference books. I get the feeling that they're kind of the de facto standard on programming reference books, so maybe this comment isn't all that helpful. Anyways, good luck with learning the language!

Some of the O'Reilly (sp?) books are good and some aren't. Actually, I guess I've had something like a 75% success rate with them. At the moment, though, they don't have a Python 3 specific book, and there are differences between Python 3 and 2.

I will just have to deal with the online references for now, I'm sad to say. I'd really like to have a good, printed reference, but that doesn't appear to be available at this time.

Oh, no. This book JUST showed up last week and I was hoping to use it to get up to speed on Python 3 (although we will continue to use Python 2 for a bit more in our courses). I guess I can thank you for allowing me to not waste my time.