<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Charles,<div><br></div><div>You might check out Toby Segaran's <i>Programming Collective Intelligence </i>(2007 O'Reilly). It's chock full of practical Python code, and the students will be exposed to a broad range of algorithms (clustering, search/query/ranking, Bayesian classification, neural networks) and useful libraries for parsing and working with data. While the topics sound quite advanced, the book remains accessible because of its focus on applied programming. I can imagine lots of interesting assignments around the topics in the book.</div><div><br></div><div>However, you'll have to see whether he addresses the more "interesting" language constructs of Python, since the examples are fairly focused and rather scripty. You could augment it with an exploration of the internals of one of the interesting Python packages, say SQLAlchemy or one of the web app frameworks...</div><div><br></div><div>(I agree on Kirby's Safari online library suggestion, too).</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>Thomas</div><div><br><div><div>On Jan 15, 2009, at 9:22 PM, Charles Anderson wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Does anyone have a recommendation for a (text) book to use for teaching<br>Python to students who already know Java? I'll be teaching a college class<br>in spring to students who have had at least 2 quarters of Java. So, they<br>should be hip to the basics of programming - e.g., conditionals, iteration,<br>methods, classes, etc. I'd like to focus on "more interesting" bits of<br>Python that are difficult or impossible in straight Java - e.g.,<br>introspection, duck-typing, possibly metaclasses.<br><br><br>thanks,<br>Charles.<br>-------------- next part --------------<br>An HTML attachment was scrubbed...<br>URL: <<a href="http://mail.python.org/pipermail/portland/attachments/20090115/129bc352/attachment.htm">http://mail.python.org/pipermail/portland/attachments/20090115/129bc352/attachment.htm</a>><br>_______________________________________________<br>Portland mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Portland@python.org">Portland@python.org</a><br>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/portland<br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>