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Thread: Suggestions for a second Python book

  1. #1
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    Suggestions for a second Python book

    I've been learning Python for a couple of months now and am looking for a good second book to continue with. The first book I read was Dive into Python which I really enjoyed. I felt that book went at a reasonably fast pace while not trying to throw too much information at you at once. My main problem with many introductory programming books is that they go at a brutally slow pace and discuss many aspects of the language that aren't really too important.

    My experience with the language so far is limited to several smaller Python apps. The only somewhat complex program being an audioscrobbler webservice that populates mp3 comment tags with the corresponding top artist/track tags from last.fm. I'd like to add some more features to this including support for other audio formats, a GUI and I may turn it into an amarok plugin script that performs this for each song played.

    So, what I'm looking for is a book that goes into some more advanced python topics. Mainly I want a book that will help me get in the habit of doing things in the pythonic way as so many people like to put it. I often find myself writing code in a similar fashion to how I would in C++ or Java and want to break that habit. A more thorough discussion of the standard libraries and some of the more useful third party ones would be nice as well.

  2. #2
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    Re: Suggestions for a second Python book

    O'reily's python cookbook[0] is very good. It has lots of discusion of pythonic ways of doing things. It assumes that you know the basics of python and covers some fairly advanced topics.

    there is a sample chapter [1] you can have a look at on the o'reily website.

    [0] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythoncook2/
    [1] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pytho...ter/index.html

  3. #3
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    Re: Suggestions for a second Python book

    +1 for Python Cookbook

    It has many idioms that you wouldn't normally pick up by teaching yourself.
    Very good.
    ACCU - for programmers who care

  4. #4
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    Re: Suggestions for a second Python book

    Quote Originally Posted by ssam View Post
    O'reily's python cookbook[0] is very good. It has lots of discusion of pythonic ways of doing things. It assumes that you know the basics of python and covers some fairly advanced topics.
    Thanks for the input, I'll have to give that a look. I know through my university I can read many of the O'Reilly books online on Safari. Any other recommendations or further support for the Python Cookbook is welcome.

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