[Tutor] got text switched

[Jim Mooney]

 It does however seem
> to remember my last style and just use that again.

I'd like a default - choose rich text when I need it but always go
back to the default. But like Javascript's annoying habit of deciding
your type invisibly, with arcane rules (one reason I switched to
Python), Gmail sometimes does too much for you ;')  I could probably
write something in autohotkey or webmonkey, but there is only so much
time in a day and the Lutz book (Learning Python - O'Reilly) is Big
and Very Detailed, so I'm focusing on that. I'll just try to keep an
eye on my format.

Speaking of which, I was amazed there were so many complaints about
what I consider the Lutz book's PyVirtues, on Amazon - "It's too big,"
or "The author repeats himself."  Well, duh, if it's that big and that
detailed you Need repetition, unless you have a photographic memory,
which I do not. I am glad to see something repeated three times in
different ways. Bythe third time I might remember it.  (A plug for
Clipmate here - when a long string of Python expressions is listed in
a book, Clipmate's automatic text cleanup or exploding paste can
usually strip out all the garbage, like >>> and commas, so you can
just sequentially paste the terms into a Python program to see what
each one does.)  Besides stripping, you can replace those dumb "fancy"
quotes with ones that will work in the interpreter, or even work up a
regex.

I'm amazed more programming authors don't realize it's a lot easier to
just copy a program fragment into an interpreter, from an ebook, than
go hunting for the downloaded folder of examples. Go fancy with the
printed book, but us plain quotes for e-books. Thankfully, Lutz wrote
his book so you can copy and paste easily with no errors. Or he beat
the editor about the head and shoulders until he agreed to usability.

As for the detail, Lutz seems to anticipate nearly every confusion or
screwup I'm about to make, which my last Python book didn't. It left
me in the woods a lot, so I had to come here asking dumb questions.
That's a big timesaver. So I recommend the  Lutz book, which despite
its size, he says is only the Python intro. His second book is on
practical programming in depth.

Jim