Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but needs updating
Comment: I can't really complain about the book, except that newer 2.5+ libraries are not covered (e.g. the "subprocess" module"). It isn't meant to be comprehensive in the sense that you won't learn everything, but it covers enough for one to become a good python programmer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A happily recieved gift
Comment: I bought this book as a gift for my husband, and he was excited to recieve it. I believe he has found it informative and more in depth than his first Python book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great resource for the python programmer.
Comment: The only thing I regret about buying this book is not getting the hardcover version - it's a huge, comprehensive book.
It's got the best section on GUI programming in python that I've seen so far, and all the examples given throughout the book are practical, useful thing - unlike a lot of other programming books that only give you proofs-of-concept.
If you're already comfortable with python, and are looking to solidify your knowledge of it to a great degree, this is the book for you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: poorly organized introduction to python
Comment: I thought this would be similar to Programming Perl, both a good introduction to the language *and* a decent reference. Unfortunately, it does neither task well.It fails as a reference because 1) it is poorly organized: information on each concept (printing, for example), is scattered throughout the book; 2) the index is atrocious. There is no way to find the key description of any part of the language using the index, and I often find important concepts in the book that are not in the index.
The poor index, combined with the scattered organization, means I'm constantly frustrated when I want to look up some particular element of the language.
As an introduction, the book is OK. I would have liked to see some meatier code examples. As another reviewer mentioned, the examples are more about the syntax of the language than actual applications that you might learn from. This is a style point -- if you learn best from large chunks of example code, this is not the book for you.
Also, key modules (sys and math, for example) are barely mentioned.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
