Now for Something Completely Different…

by Tim Lee on April 4, 2006 · View Comments

I think we have a few geek readers, so I thought I’d take advantage of that to ask: can anyone suggest a good introduction to Python? I’m fluent in Perl and semi-proficient with C and Java, so a book geared toward procedurally-oriented programmers would be ideal. I’m particularly interested in mastering the Lispy aspects of the language, so a book that talks about its functional-programming attributes would be great.

I see that O’Reilly’s Python books have titles that mirror the Canonical O’Reilly Perl books. Are they any good?

View Comments Posted in: Miscellaneous

  • Dive Into Python is excellent - it's free online at diveintopython.org, and also published as a book. The Python Cookbook is also good at helping with understanding language idioms.
  • Max
    I'd second Mike's suggestion: go to http://www.python.org/doc and do the tutorial. The "library reference" and "language reference" have almost everything else you'd need (after doing the tutorial).
  • Most of what you need can be found for free in their online tutorial. That's how I picked up the rudiments of the language a few years ago. The O'Reilly books are supposed to be pretty good, though. You might want to look into mod_python if you are going to be using this for web stuff because of the Python Server Pages feature that it is supposed to have.
  • The best items I think are online, particularly a python primer, and "Dive into Python", an excellent read that quickly stretches your brain on python.

    Please email me at tobyr21@gail.com, and I will send you a small zip file with my pointers to Python materials I've used online.
    - tobias robison
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