Comment Re:Better Than First Edition? (Score 1) 163
I sincerely hope that this version is better than the first edition, although anything short of a random re-arrangement of pages would serve as an improvement. The first edition actually delayed my initial use of Python by about a year and a half. I had heard wonderful things about the language so I figured, "Ah, an O'Reilly book!" Big mistake.
Wow, I'm quite surprised actually, I had exactly the opposite experience with the first edition of "Learning Python."
I distinctly remember picking up the book in '99, reading the first three chapters to get introduced to the language basics, then writing my first web-scraper to pull weather forecasts off weather.com and forward them as emails, arriving on my handset as an SMS message (AT&T was running a free email-to-SMS gateway at the time, and didn't charge to receive the messages). I think I skipped ahead to chapter 11 or so to find the code for reading html as text from a URL, as opposed to a local file.
I had never written a tool which perform network lookups and was really impressed with the simplicity of the language and the book. The progression was from the very general to the very specific. The first three chapters were a history and basic introduction to the relatively unique concepts such as whitespace handling and how to deal with strings, as well as how Python handles common stuff like while and for loops. If I recall correctly it stepped into classes and objects after that, then proceed into specific libraries.
I've been doing professional coding in Python ever since, and always recommend "Learning Python" as an introduction to newbies.
My only disappointment in fact was that the size of the book has grown so much in the course of the last few editions.