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Hi! As a member of the Python community, could you please pick a better textbook than Dive into Python? Think Python is a far better book, off the top of my hea
by MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
Hi! As a member of the Python community, could you please pick a better textbook than Dive into Python? Think Python is a far better book, off the top of my head, but nearly anything's better than DiP for people not acquainted with the language. (http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/ http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/)
- egor83 15y agoHere's a Google Wave containing list of problems found in DiP: https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+8KfvUGXPC https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+8KfvUG...
- scott_s 15y agoSome of those are problems, but many of them are "I would present this material differently."
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoThe factual inaccuracies in the Strings chapter, covering encodings and Unicode, are horrific enough. Confusing UCS-4 and UTF-32, getting historical orderings wrong, completely forgetting to mention Latin-1, and worst, failing to directly outline the connection between encoded streams of bytes, and Unicode strings, in clear and direct language. Also, the horrific RE abuse at the beginning of Chapter 6 is a remarkable standalone example of Doin' It Wrong: import re def plural(noun): if re.search('[sxz]$', noun): return re.sub('$', 'es', noun) elif re.search('[^aeioudgkprt]h$', noun): return re.sub('$', 'es', noun) elif re.search('[^aeiou]y$', noun): return re.sub('y$', 'ies', noun) else: return noun + 's'