Book recommendation

[Madhusudan Singh]

Paul Robson wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 22:21:34 -0500, Madhusudan Singh wrote:
> 
>> I am trying to teach myself Python. I have extensive prior programming
>> experience in Fortran, a little in C/C++,  Pascal, etc.
>> 
>> So far, I have been reading online tutorials at www.python.org and a book
>> I found at the library - Martin Brown's The Complete Reference Python. Is
>> there a standard classic book to learn from that I could buy ?
>> 
>> Say something like Metcalf and Reid's Fortran 90/95 Explained or
>> Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language.
> 
> Hi there Madhusudan :)
> 

Hi :)

> There's a couple of brief introductions worth reading ; one is by the
> language's creator Guido van Rossum, and the other by a chap called
> Swaroop (A byte of Python I think it's called). Both of these are quick
> read introduction type things.
> 
> A most entertaining and completely backward book is "Dive into Python"
> (all these are free downloads but you can buy the latter as a book) which
> has the approach where each section starts of with a relatively
> complex working chunk of Python code, then pulls it apart and shows you
> how all the bits work, and explains the various concepts as you go along.
> 

"Dive into Python" seems to be the favorite so far in this NG. 

> Once you've done that, if you want some useful bits of coding just to get
> the feel of it, try answering some of the Perl or Ruby Quiz-of-the-week
> questions (archives are online search for Perl|Ruby quiz of the week).

perl-qotw was interesting and language agnostic (If perl can do something,
so should Python - not that I know much perl). I will look into it on a
regular basis when I get my bearings.

> 
> None of the tasks are more than a page or two of python, but it's a quick
> way of getting a feel for the language.
> 
> The other thing that's handy to have to hand is the Quick Reference which
> is about 20 or so pages and handy for a quick look up.

Yep.

> 
> There are many IDEs and Editors about from the quick and dirty through to
> full IDEs (which personally I find too much of a clutter). I personally
> like Scite which is the former.

I use emacs for everything except authoring webpages. An operating system
disguised as an editor :)

> 
> Remember, for i in range(100): print "Murali chucks" :)

The above is syntactically correct only if you did not install
python-larry :)