Programming Python by Mark Lutz

For those of you that may possibly read my blog, you may have noticed my last post about wanting to learn Python. Well, I have the unique opportunity of reviewing a few technical books as a blogger so I'm going to start putting up some short reviews as they come along. I'm also going to post on some of my nerd projects as I go along as well to keep you up-to-date on what I'm messing around with.
So, on to what I thought about Programming Python by Mark Lutz.

The book is a great tool if you want to delve further into Python but if you're new to programming and trying to learn Python, you'll want to start with Learning Python by Mark Lutz as that will give you the necessary foundation. Then you can move to Programming Python. I was interested in learning the language and didn't realize there was a Learning Python so I got Programming Python instead. Luckily, I've programmed in a couple of languages so I was able to go through the book and learn what I needed to know. I guess being an engineer helps as well since I can figure out some other things on my own if necessary.

In the book, there are many good examples given that explain what you are trying to learn. As with other O'Reilly books I've looked through at the library, this also has plenty of code to help you through all the topics covered in the book. The index is well done and is great as a reference for later on when you need to look something up in a pinch. Something I found even more useful is a digital copy of the book. Using Adobe Reader, you can search through the entire text so if you really need to find something, you can find it quickly, even without the index. I guess that's a plus now that things are going digital.

What I found really interesting is Chapter 20 about the integration of Python with C. Seeing a lot of operational systems use C, that chapter was particularly useful as it helped me better understand how to interface the two languages together. MATLAB is also able to interface with C and it's great, but expensive. Python is free so I can do similar things to MATLAB without the hefty price and I can interface with C. It was a very useful chapter.

Alright, I'm done reviewing for now but I hope to have something a little more detailed in the next review I may do. It'll be a while longer as I've got a ton of other things going on but I hope to review something about an Arduino next time.

Stay tuned...