Ace book for learning Python

As title suggests, this is an ace book for learning the essentials of Python - for me it’s MicroPython.

Whilst you can search for info on the web, it is helpful to have a succinct source of knowledge to be productive.

I have been writing software since 1966. Much of that time has been spent writing either in low-level machine code (4bit to 64 bit processors) or several scientific high-level languages, including ALGOL & FORTRAN, as well as VBA for MS Excel.

As my grandson was learning Python at school I decided to obtain Jamie Chan's book to give me a straight-forward introduction to the language at a reasonable price. It has served that purpose satisfactorily.

For those that have never written code before this book does ease the user gently through the process of writing in Python revealing, in some cases, a variety of methods to achieve the same result. A small criticism is that some examples could be enhanced with only a minimum of extra typing to make them more interactive or to make results clearer to understand when reading the output.

As mentioned in the header of my review, some "shortcut" programming hints are missing such as how using ' as the outer identifiers of text with " inside that text string can be used to print the " character directly within the string rather than entering \" ; for example:- print('This is "bad programming" ?') gives the same basic result as the more correct: print("This is \"good programming\" ?").

All-in-all, for those who have never written code before, this book serves the purpose at a reasonable cost. You will, however, need to buy other books in the series if you intend to go beyond running in the interpreter and make standalone executables which could run in a user-created Window environment.

This is a terrific book and great value for money.

I'll keep it short and to the point - if you have programming experience and want to get into Python coding, then this is the way to do it. It talks you through the essential stuff and in around one day you'll be up and running with the basic knowledge from which you can learn further, by doing.

What it WON'T do is teach you how to code - you need to already understand the basics and have experience in something else, even something like shell scripting. It also won't teach you the really advanced and esoteric things that you can do - this is about how to quickly get into writing Python code and works great for that. Once you have started, you can learn by doing. Python is very intuitive.

I was sceptical that this (a) was any good at the price and (b) would actually be useful. In fact, it has proven to be exactly what I needed and at an amazingly low price to boot.

Can't ask for anything more than that, get this if you are someone with some coding experience wanting to use Python for the first time. It really will get you going quickly and tells you what you need to know.

good product

Read this in a few hours. It’s a helpful start. Doesn’t tell you much about key python libraries though. Wish it got into some more sophisticated use cases too.

It took more than a day to read.

I still can't talk to snakes... But strangely I can talk to my computer now.

It is very good for learning basic python. Some of the examples could have been made simpler. An important thing was not mentioned which was how to keep printing on one line. so to print with line feed do this print('Fred') and to print without line feed print('Fred',end='') or you can insert a space or anything in the = quotes. Perhaps i missed where it was mentioned but got a infuriated trying to print on one line.

I am impressed by this book not only for its concise style and simplicity, but also because I have found the only pitfalls to be my own carelessness. I have long wanted to move on from the much loved, but now obsolete, BBC basic, but have never got beyond the first few pages of books on Visual Basic and Xcode (Swift). Python, apparently, does not baffle you with confusing version changes every few months.

I wanted a "pick up / put down" retirement pastime to keep my aging brain active and my creativity stimulated. I think that this book has achieved both targets and at a modest cost!

Onwards and upwards?

Nice book to read

The contents are focused on beginners' level and gave detailed step-by-step explanations, which is great. However, the book arrived in a dirty state with black fingerprints all over the sides of the book. Couldn't wipe them away fully.

les bases pour bien comprendre le fonctionnement de python et même un peu plus, le livre est écrit dans un anglais très facile à comprendre pour quelqu'un qui a un peu de base.

je recommande pour les lecteurs francophones.

Linguagem clara, direta, com exemplos adequados e atuais, e que constroem um entendimento muito sólido da utilização de Python para solução de problemas computacionais. Chega, de forma muito didática, a tratar de programação orientada a objetos com Python, e no capitúlo Projeto, apresenta e desenvolve um jogo didático de matemática completo. Nos Apêndices aprofunda o uso de strings, listas, tuplas, e dicionários. No último apêndice oferece uma possível solução do projeto do jogo. Vale absolutamente cada centavo usado para sua compra!

The incoherent way of presenting the basic information is the biggest flaw of this book. There is no didactic approach visible to me, the author directly starts with examples without giving context. If you look at the table of contents it is impressive but this comes at a price - everything is presented in a very limited way and I seriously doubt that someone will be able to implement something buy reading this book. I sadly have to admit that there are way better books on Kindle which are even for free. The author should also get the Python series by Michael Knapp which is really good IMHO.