any author you find very good has written a book on Python?

[avi.e.gross at gmail.com]

Subject: searching for books by an author you like on rather unrelated
topics.

I am curious if you normally look or books by a writer of Mysteries you like
to see if they also wrote Science Fiction or Cookbooks and so on?

Having said that, there are plenty of people in the Computer Science field
who are quite multi-lingual and may know one or a few "languages" intimately
and quite a bit about others and at least have heard of many more. Most such
people never write a single book of the kind you are looking for.

However, once someone does write some introductory book on some language or
other system, sometimes with co-authors, some do indeed proceed to write
additional books albeit not always of high quality. I have seen people who
say were quite familiar with a language like C then turn around and try to
teach languages like Python or R with an emphasis on doing things using
similar methods like using explicit loops where others might use vectorized
operations or comprehensions. 

I think the method of selecting an author is a bit flawed as a concept but
not irrelevant. An author for an introductory textbook for non-programmers
might not do as well in another book about the same language made for
programmers who already can program in one or more other languages and
mainly want to know how this language differs from others. And certainly
they may not do well writing about more detailed or sophisticated aspects of
the language. But the opposite is true. Many "experts" are horrible at
explaining simpler things at the right level for newbies.

You, do sound like you know something about programming in one or more other
languages and simply want to add-on Python. There are quite a few books
available including some older and some recent. What you likely should
prioritize is newer books that focus over post-version2 as that is supposed
to no longer be used when possible. Then you need to figure out if you are
just curious or want a job using it and so on. 

One possibility is to visit a library (or online e-books) and flip through
pages. Often you may find an earlier edition and after some perusal,
consider getting an updated recent version of that book by the same author.

I have read dozens of books on Python but leave recommendations to others as
each is different and I wanted to see many sides.

-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avi.e.gross=gmail.com at python.org> On
Behalf Of Meredith Montgomery
Sent: Monday, September 5, 2022 10:23 PM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: any author you find very good has written a book on Python?

I never read a book on Python.  I'm looking for a good one now.  I just
searched the web for names such as Charles Petzold, but it looks like he
never wrote a book on Python.  I also searched for Peter Seibel, but he also
never did.  I also tried to search for Richard Heathfield.  (I took a look
at his ``C Unleashed'' once and I liked what I saw.)  This is how I search
for books --- I go through the authors first.  Charles Petzold, for
instance, anything he writes is worth reading it.  (Have you given his
Annotated Turing a shot?  It's a very nice read.)

So that's my request --- any author you find very good has written a book on
Python?

It could be for in a certain specific context.  For instance, I also
searched for Hadley Wickham in the hope that he could have written a
data-science-type of book using Python.  I like his writing a lot, but he
also only seems to have written only for the R language.

Thank you!
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