Books I'd like to see

[Alex Martelli]

Michele Simionato wrote:
   ...
> But Python is designed in such a way that a lot of it can be taught
> without talking about objects. Yes, you are right that in its heart
> it is very strongly object oriented (maybe even more than Java or Ruby),

I don't know about "more than Ruby" -- Ruby's pretty thoroughly OO, too.
I'd call it a wash.

> but NOT on the surface. This is on purpose and I think it is a good
> thing (for teaching purposes and for other reasons too). I would welcome

To teach people coming from other procedural languages, yes.  To teach
total beginners, I dunno; Smalltalk (arguably even more OO than Ruby or
Python, as even 'if' is not a statement but a message sent to a boolean
object for example) was in part designed to teach children.  I'm not sure
how I would go about starting out with OO, but it's presumably a respectable
theory.  Are there books based on that theory for any language, btw?

> a metaprogramming/advanced OOP book by the Martellibot, but this would NOT
> be a book for beginners.

If it had "advanced" in the title it sure wouldn't:-).

> Actually I was confused by the tutorial that you liked so much, since
> when I first read it I knew nothing about OOP. I don't think talking
> immediately about OOP would be helpful for a total beginner. On the

I don't think Guido's tutorial is oriented to total beginners at all.

> other hand, if you already knew OOP from another language, then you
> are an experienced enough programmer and you can learn Python from
> the Nutshell, isn't it?

But the Nutshell only gets into OO _after_ it has covered functions, flow
control, etc; it doesn't _start_ from OO, which is the original poster's 
request.


Alex