Python books (was Which regex syntax mode?)

[Erik Max Francis]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> "Tim Hammerquist" <tim at degree.ath.cx> wrote:
>
> > I'm reading O'Reilly's Programming Python, based on Python
> > 1.3, so it only mentions regex and regsub.  I'm glad I asked.  =)
>
> FYI: I tried that book first, and it put me off Python for a year.

This is also the book I used to learn Python.  Being an experienced
programmer with a lot of experience in a wide variety of languages, I
still found Python easy to learn, but because the language is so simple
and not because the book is particularly good.  I certainly wouldn't
recommend it as a learning guide, even to someone with a fair amount of
programming experience; it is disorganized, in some cases incomplete
where it should not be, and actually makes it _harder_ to learn a simple
language like Python well.

I've heard that the other O'Reilly Python book is much better (it is
aimed at inexperienced programmers), and would like to recommend it to
friends; anyone have good things to say about it?  I'm specifically
thinking of recommending it to a friend who understands programming but
has been out of programming for a long, long time.

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