Learning Python, 5th Edition by Mark Lutz (PDF)

Description

Get a comprehensive, in-depth introduction to the core Python language with this hands-on book. Based on author Mark Lutz’s popular training course, this updated fifth edition will help you quickly write efficient, high-quality code with Python. It’s an ideal way to begin, whether you’re new to programming or a professional developer versed in other languages.Complete with quizzes, exercises, and helpful illustrations, this easy-to-follow, self-paced tutorial gets you started with both Python 2.7 and 3.3— the latest releases in the 3.X and 2.X lines—plus all other releases in common use today. You’ll also learn some advanced language features that recently have become more common in Python code.Explore Python’s major built-in object types such as numbers, lists, and dictionariesCreate and process objects with Python statements, and learn Python’s general syntax modelUse functions to avoid code redundancy and package code for reuseOrganize statements, functions, and other tools into larger components with modulesDive into classes: Python’s object-oriented programming tool for structuring codeWrite large programs with Python’s exception-handling model and development toolsLearn advanced Python tools, including decorators, descriptors, metaclasses, and Unicode processing

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Mark Lutz is a leading Python trainer, the author of Python’s earliest and best-selling texts, and a pioneering figure in the Python world. Mark is the author of the three O’Reilly books: Learning Python, Programming Python, and Python Pocket Reference, all currently in fourth or fifth editions. He has been using and promoting Python since 1992, started writing Python books in 1995, and began teaching Python classes in 1997. As of Spring 2013, Mark has instructed 260 Python training sessions, taught roughly 4,000 students in live classes, and written Python books that have sold 400,000 units and been translated to at least a dozen languages. Together, his two decades of Python efforts have helped to establish it as one of the most widely used programming languages in the world today. In addition, Mark has been in the software field for 30 years. He holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin where he explored implementations of the Prolog language, and over his career has worked as a professional software developer on compilers, programming tools, scripting applications, and assorted client/server systems. Mark maintains a training website (http://learning-python.com) and an additional book support site on the Web (http://www.rmi.net/~lutz).

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This huge book has a comparably-sized index of 33 pages. Index thoroughness is one of the first things I look for in a reference book. If you are a moderately-advanced to advanced Python programmer, this can be your go-to book for solving some esoteric programming problems. You can read it as a very dense novel, or as I do, dip into it when necessary. I repeatedly return to this book when stumped with a Python question, the latest being exactly how the ‘iter’ keyword works with a list (answer on page 437). The scope and detail in this book are unbelievable. Just don’t drop it on your foot.

⭐Very thoroughly covers the differences between Python 2.X and Python 3.X which is very important because of the numerous differences between the two versions, both large and small. I love that there is an answer key to the end-of-section programming exercises. Some books give you exercises with no solutions, and it’s so much more useful to have them in there if you’re self-learning, so you may compare your own solution against the author’s. It’s 1590 pages of very clearly explained basic and not so basic instruction to the Python language. I’m very happy I bought this Python book to use to begin my Pythonic journey!

⭐This is a great, thorough, quality book on Python, targeted at individuals who have some experience writing programs, but who want to learn Python to write production-grade Python programs.All the people griping about how long this book is are obviously not the target audience of this book. Yes the book is long, but to effectively use a programming language, there is a lot to learn. And this book does a great job of metering out that information. All the people griping about how there’s too many “forward references” to other topics, are obviously not the target audience of this book. Yes there are forward references, because there MUST be. You can’t learn every topic about a language in a linear way– it’s simply not possible. If you are the target audience of this book, then you already understand that.If you’ve never programmed before, this is the WRONG book. If you want a quick get-acquainted book about Python, this is the WRONG book. If you want a reference manual for Python, this the WRONG book. This book does NOT claim to be any of those things. This book is a tutorial for people who have written programs before, who want to become an expert in Python. If that’s you, then you understand that the book is necessarily long.The Python language is a somewhat “larger” language than “C” or old-school Java. So there is a lot to cover: “lists” are BUILT IN to the language, “sequences” are BUILT IN to the language, “dictionaries” are BUILT IN to the language, “tuples” are BUILT IN to the language, “sets” are BUILT IN to the language. This is in contrast to the Java language or “C” language. This book explains all of those BUILT INS and “why” they are built in. If you aren’t interested in any of that, then this is the WRONG book for you.This book also goes into detail about why the language is designed the way it is. And it does this not only in regard to the high-level design of the language, but it does this for every nuance and detail of the language. This is great information if your goal is to follow best practices when actually using the language for real world problems. If you just want to write little toy programs and you don’t care about best practices, then this is the WRONG book for you.The entirety of the Python ecosystem is MASSIVE, and this book goes into detail about a lot of that ecosystem. (Although even a book of this size does not cover ALL of that ecosystem). This includes things like: embedding Python in a larger “C” application, calling “C” functions from Python, properties, metaclasses, decorators, Unicode, exceptions, object-oriented classes, etc., etc., etc.You think it’s possible to learn all that detail, learn all the best practices of managing all those language features, and do it in a 100 page book? Well, if you do, then you are not the target audience of this book. People who want to learn to use Python to do production-grade programming realize that understanding all this detail takes a lot of pages, it takes patience, and it takes forward references.

⭐I don’t write too many reviews but I have to review this book. I’m just trying to learn the language to do some web, security, and rasberry pi development on my own. I tried to learn python over a year ago, got frustrated and quit. I tried to pick up the language again about 2 weeks ago. I have read and tried to work through Learning Python the Hard Way (LPHW). LPHW is a good resource and it did give me a general understand of the language. It teaches python version 2x. I have also read Dive into Python 3 (DP3). DP3 is also a good resource and it teaches python version 3x. I have also read and referenced […] For the most part, I am able to write simple code. But I got frustrated when I tried to review and understand complex code structures. I had a hard time understanding the nuances of the language. I spent hours searching online and watching tutorial videos. But I was constantly frustrated because there were all these exceptions that didn’t make sense to me. I kept on asking why this works and why that does not work.The best thing about this book is that it explain the nuances of the language by giving multiple examples. So it does explains it in a complete manner. A lot of other resources will touch upon a topic and then glance over it. I often wondered.. what about this… so a lot of other resources expect you to test the other cases out which in most circumstance will be okay, but in others, you are still left wondering “why?”. This book does not do that. In fact, I almost didn’t need to try the examples on the interactive python command line because it was so thorough.This book is not for the beginner. You will get lost among the trees in the forest because there is so much information in this book. If you are impatient or need to start coding right away, you really won’t be able to do this with Learning Python. LPHW and DP3 are much better at getting you up and running. But to write error free code, you have to understand the nuances of the language which Learning Python teaches you. Learning Python the Hard Way (free on the internet) and Dive into Python 3 (also free) are great resources to get introduced to the language. I would recommend both before you delve into this book. But once you get an understand of the basics of python, this book will fill in the missing details.As a disclaimer, I have only been reading this book for a day. I have already read 300 pages. A lot of it was review. But I learned a lot of new stuff as well that filled in the gaps. I have not read the section on regex or the more advanced sections yet so this review is not complete. But so far, I am impressed on the thoroughness of the subject matter.The main grip I have is that I bought the kindle version. If I read it in a linear fashion the material seem to flow nicely. But when I come to certain sections, I need to jump around. You find this a lot with any technical book. The kindle version makes this difficult because I cannot “easily” keep track of what I was reading so I get side tracked a lot. I also cannot effectively add notes (yes, I know I can add notes). I ended up using 4 devices to read this book just to keep track of where I was. I may get the hardcopy so that I have an easy quick reference book to look at later at my desk. With a hard copy, I use bookmarkers that I can quickly page to. I know about the kindle bookmarks but they are cumbersome to use. Fortunately, its hard to beat the fact that I can carry this book on my phone if I wanted to. So I would rate the kindle version 3 stars.Overall, I would buy this again on kindle.

⭐The book was as described. It was in great condition.

⭐Despite the title, this seems to me good book as long as you don’t need to learn Python from it. With such a long book, I would have hoped to cover the different areas first at an elementary level, to get an initial grasp of the whole field, then go over the same areas but at a more advanced level, then more advanced, up to proficiency. But no, the author dives in in excruciating detail leaving the reader exasperated and exhausted, so that you can read hundreds, thousands of pages, and not actually be able to do anything practical at all. With all due respect to the author’s undoubted expertise, It seems to be written by a windbag who is too fond of his own writing and inflicting it on the poor reader who just wants to learn the language. After struggling to about halfway, I gave up and read the book with the same title by Fabrizio Romano, which gets you up and running and doing useful things in a fraction of the time. I do come back to this book for reference, though.

⭐I like the book, enjoying it a lot, right about chapter 9 or so; although it is dense and it needs time to digest.Pros:- Very in-depth for 2.x and 3.x, really like how the author tackles subjects.- Clear examples and goes in depth in all of them.- So full of information that I feel I learn more than expected.- Excellent as a reference as well.- Excellent to learn how things really work in python, not a tutorial, not a simple guy, an in-depth killer book.- Good set of quiz questions and also exercises.- Good value for money.Cons:- Can be slightly dense.- Some things are not extremely necessary and going too in-depth can cause the reader to think “when are we writing some code? c’mon”.Buy it, have it on your desk.

⭐Had read the reviews and was ready for a bit of meandering around the topics and material – but wow, how did this get past editing? As a fairly experienced dev in Java, Ruby, Go and several scripting languages what I hoped for was a (at least) semi structured walkthrough of all the key Python goodies. Instead it’s more like a novel, way less blurb and more examples would have been much better.I may return to it now and then, but I’d have to be in the mood.The author would have done well to instead look at something like “learning Perl”, which gives you everything you need in a fraction of the pages and time while doing so with style and aplomb. I think there is a balance that could/should be struck.Overall, it clear a lot of work and passion went into this, it’s just not very “consumable” , in my view.

⭐The first thing that strikes you about this book is that it’s big. 1500 pages big. Big enough that physically handling the book is inconvenient.Upon reading it, you’ll see that much of the size comes from repetition. Many of the chapters present alternative ways to do the same thing, often using this technique as an explanatory device; yet somehow, the author manages the doublethink of continually repeating the Python “There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it” mantra.The order in which the material is presented is wrong. The book explains Python’s basic types before its syntax; this means it’s 300 pages in before you can actually start writing code that does anything. It’s 473 pages in before the concept of a function is introduced; even if this text was written for those who had done no previous programming at all, this seems bizarre. Obviously the sections on types have to talk a little bit about syntax and functions (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to say anything about what those types actually do in the first few chapters), which is yet again a recipe for repetition.Exercises are few and far between. There are “quizzes” at the end of each chapter, but they’re very simple, knowledge-based questions which don’t require you to write code. Programming is learned by doing, so you’ll need to invent your own projects to do if you want to learn with this book.If you can ignore the structural defects, the book is beautifully written at the detailed level, and the code examples are of a high standard. It is highly readable – you won’t need to continually re-read to understand what’s going on – but the repetition means you will find yourself skimming or skipping large sections of the text.The book is a broad overview of a vast language; it is not a detailed API reference, and doesn’t have examples of every possible API call. And neither should it be; all that stuff is online. It does explain the concepts well and give you an insight into why Python has evolved to be the way it is. However, if you’re an experienced programmer looking for a quick way to break into the Python world, you might want to look for something a little more concise.

⭐It’s a brilliant book, well written. An experienced Python programmer will love diving into it to understand topics in detail.But if you were looking to learn a programming language, to understand programming or to learn by doing, this is not the book for you. It would be better titled “Become a Python Expert”!I’ve studied the first 300 pages and have decided to look for something a bit more practical and snappy!

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