Average Customer Review: 
| An excellent, concise Python reference | |
Intending to familiarize myself with Python, I picked up a copy of O'Reilly's Programming Python a couple of years ago. After an initial attempt at going through the book, it has been on my book shelf since. It was simply not organized in a fashion that allowed me to quickly pick up the essentials of the language.As someone who was already familiar with C/C++ and Perl, but wanting to learn Python, the Python Essential Reference was exactly what I was looking for. Yes, most of the information contained in the book is available in the Python reference documents, but not collected in one place. In addition to adding examples from his own experience, David Beazley has done an excellent job in concisely summarizing the built-in features of the language as well as providing a nicely indexed library reference. While this book may not be immediately useful for someone looking specifically for a language tutorial, beginning or advanced Python programmers will get useful information from this book for much longer than most tutorial style books. Highly recommended.
| No Truer Reference Have I Found | |
A single voice amongst so many, what can I say? Python itself is such a straight-forward, easy-to-learn language already that it requires little documentation to convey its syntax and concepts. In this respect Python meets the goals of its designer and prophet. This book wastes no time in providing the reader with this syntax and the underlying concepts.If you are a programmer of worth then picking up this book and an afternoon should teach you Python. It worked for me, and if you ask my fellow programmers my worth is subject to open and heated debate. I do a lot of my programming in some C and a lot of Perl and other scripting tools. So the foundation was there. Within a short time this book had me writing classes with automated debugging and documentation. I have yet to find another Python book that does the job as effectively in as few pages. If you're looking for a code-by-the-numbers tutorial, this isn't for you, however. Check out "Learning Python" by O'Reilly for that. The "Programming Python" explains the myriad modules that are available for Python and serves more as a cookbook. (I suppose having a book entitled "Python Cookbook" would generate misconceptions as to the content.)
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