Python Cookbook book review

[Ron Stephens]

Python Cookbook, by Alex Martelli and David Ascher, O'Reilly, 2002, 575 
pages.

This is a most excellent book.


There are numerous code examples in each of 17 different categories. 
These code examples are useful, interesting, and educational. The 
Discussions of each code example are what makes this book so valuable. 
The discussions are written by some of the most knowledgable and 
articulate members of the Python community, and they are well written, 
illuminating, and often subtly witty.


Each of the 17 chapters has an introduction written by one of these 
brilliant Pythonic personalities. In my opinion, these 17 introductions 
are well worth far more than the price of the book (about $39.95) all by 
themselves. These contributors include such luminaries as Guido van 
Rossum, Tim Peters, Alex Martelli, David Ascher, Fredrik Lundh, Fred 
Drake, Mark Lutz, Mark Hammond, David Beazley, and the remarkable unkown 
coder, the pseudonymous Luther Blissett, among many others.


The book includes code examples easy enough for the novice to appeciate, 
and erudite advanced examples that will add to the knowledge of the 
hoary veteran programmer, and all points in between. Whatever the level 
of sophistication of the code, it is the lucid explications given by the 
expert coders that make this book so excellent.


The 17 topic areas are Python Shortcuts, Searching and Sorting, Text, 
Files, Object Oriented Programming, Threads Processes and 
Synchronization, System Administration, Databases and Persistence, User 
Interfaces, Network Programming, Web Programming, Processing XML, 
Distributed Programming, Debugging and Testing, Programs about Programs, 
Extending and Embedding, and Algorithms.

The book rises bove its genre to become a work of art, of high 
literature, a classic of Philosophy. Are not all the great works of 
Philosophy firmly grounded in some particular area of knowledge? When 
the Particular is examined with sufficient clarity, it is able to 
illuminate the General Priinciples. Concrete expertise is abstracted by 
the genius of induction into the General.

This book is one I will cherish for many years, coming back to it often. 
It is meant to be savored, not devoured. It is a classic. It will long 
grace my bookshelf along side Aristotle, Eco, and Joyce.

And yet it is an imminently practical, down to earth, useable tool for 
learning to program better in Python, or in any language.

Buy this book.

Ron Stephens

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