Learn Python: Written from the Ground Up for Newbies and Old Programmers Alike

Want to Learn Python? Pick Up This Book!

Python is one of those languages that every now and then you hear something about it but it's not a huge buzzword like PHP or ASP.NET are. I'm not sure why not since some of the largest companies in the entire world use it -- Google, Yahoo, IronPort, CNN, the list goes on. The language is far from being young, the first version appeared over 15 years ago, but it's still an infant in the pantheon of programming languages. It's got a lot going for it for ease of use and portability goes: it's dynamically typed, doesn't need to be compiled, is extremely portable, and syntactically and lexically makes sense. There are scads of books written about Python and some of them are good, some are bad, and some are downright unreadable -- who ever said that programmers make good book authors?

This is where Mark Lutz and his infinitely successful Learning Python (also referred to as LP in this review) come into play. Mark has been writing books solely focused on Python for 12 years now, longer than any other author I've found aside from Guido von Rossum, the inventor of Python itself. Many of his books are considered to be the books to get if you wish to learn the language and learn it correctly. I've read a lot of programming books in my time as a programmer and frankly, most of them stink in terms of readability. I'm not talking about the fact that they're easy to read or get the information across but they're downright ghastly in terms of enjoying reading the darned things. Programmers program and occasionally write technical documentation but word smiths and scribes they are not. Years ago I stopped reading programming books because I found they'd make better paperweights and book shelf adornments than reading material. Mark succeeds very easily in engaging the reader to actually read the book and understand the material at hand. I've managed to read at least 20 or 30 pages a day since I got this book and I haven't tired of it yet.