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Programming Python ReviewWow. I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it's enormous. It took me almost a year to go through the whole thing, although I did stop and work through every single example. On the other hand, like "Learning Python", there are a lot of sidetracks that seem targeted at beginners which I felt could have easily been left out.
This book should be considered volume 2 of "Learning Python". "Learning Python" (or "volume 1") covers the core Python language in quite a bit of detail, but doesn't talk much about the library. "Programming Python", in turn, covers the Python library, but doesn't talk about the syntax of the language (you're expected to know all that already).
Even with 1500 pages, it would be impossible to do justice to the _entire_ Python library, so a useful subset is covered. The book is actually divided into seven subsections, and sections 2 (System Programming), 3 (GUI Programming), 4 (Internet Programming), and 5 (Tools and techniques) could each have legitimately been a book in their own right. Part 6 (Integration) was a bit weak compared to the others - it covered only two chapters, and was the only section of the book that included incomplete examples. Of course, Parts 1 & 7 were an introduction and an epilogue.
In terms of the Python standard library, "String Services", "File and Directory Access", "Data Persistence", "Generic Operating System Services", "Interprocess Communcation and Networking", "Internet Protocols and Support", and "Graphical User Interfaces" were covered indepth. "Internet Data Handling" and "Structured Markup Tools" were both touched on, but not really examined. Other Python-related topics such as Jython, Zope, ZODB and SWIG were discussed as well, along with examples.
The main strength of this book was its examples. I prefer to manually type each source example and run them, rather than downloading them from a web site - although it takes longer to work through the book that way, I end up retaining quite a bit more. For that reason, I'm frustrated by programming books that include incomplete examples (or at least not enough that I can reasonably fill in the blanks). Fortunately, this wasn't such a book - until the very last chapter, all of the examples were complete, although quite a few of them build on previous examples (sometimes a bit pointlessly, such as his GUIMixin "framework"). Chapter 15, for example, is pretty much nothing but a listing of a complete, working e-mail GUI client - I was actually able to use this to check my own e-mail (POP only... but still!)
Section 3 on GUI programming is the best coverage on TKinter available anywhere. This section alone is worth the price of the book, if you're ever going to touch TKinter. He doesn't cover Tix, unfortunately, but I believe that every single TKinter widget is discussed and demonstrated in example code. PMW and wxPython are mentioned, but just as in, "they exist" - this books perspective on GUI programming is TKinter only. Still, that's plenty to fill up 5 chapters.
This _is_ a good, useful, book - I got a lot more out of this than I got out of "Learning Python", but it can be a bit meandering at times - for its volume, I expected it to cover a lot more ground, although what the author does decide to cover, he covers in exquisite detail, including historical perspectives, real-world "war stories" and workable examples.
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