The Open Source Zone

I have experience with Fortran, some C/C++, but mostly IDL, a commercial scripting language for scientific visualization. I'm interested in Python because its an open source scripting language.

At the very least, skim the free online version before buying it. I got a copy from a friend and found it tough going. The first chapter 'dives' right into dictionaries and I didn't find it clear at all. Didn't make it past the first 2 or 3 chapters before looking for something else. The visual layout could also be better.

This book should have been called "Wade Into the Shallow End of Python." Virtually every section is punctuated by a statement to the effect of "I don't really understand how this crazy stuff works, either, so here's some other books you can read instead of this one if you want to learn anything" and it's probably the best advice the author has to offer. Numerous features of the language are glanced over or even omitted entirely just so we can enjoy three chapters worth of pointless RSS feed parsing examples and repeated exposure to a textual rendering of the author's extensive collection of obscure techno music. Rudimentary features of regular expressions are also over-explained ad infinitum despite the fact that this book is meant to target developers with experience in other programming languages. If they really needed to pad the content that much then why not cover things like metaclasses or the new generator features or pretty much anything useful?

It gets an extra star simply because it contains no painful-to-read Monty Python references which stopped being funny around 1985; something the official documentation cannot claim.

Pros:
1) The book does what the title promises - dives head in.
2) It introduces relatively wide range of topics in a readable manner.
3) Uses reasonably sized code examples
4) The writing is pretty clear and understandable
5) Has practical tidbits occasionally comparing similar functionality against C, C++, Java and Perl. Nice.
6) Provides links to further reading on a topic. Also very nice.

Cons:
1) Most topic discussions are a bit shallow and incomplete. For example it would be nice to present the reader with a comprehensive list of 'stuff' that may be done with a list, string, tuple, etc.
2) While there is a chapter on optimization, Mark doesn't mention the python profiler. I could live with that but there is no mentioning of python debugger (pdb) and there is nothing in the book about logging, either. These should not be considered 'advanced topics' and left out as they are helpful tool in learning any language (my opinion).
3) The book examples follow the 'Look at this cool yet obfuscated stuff I can do with Python - and oh, BTW, this is what it really means' methodology. While the follow-up discussions are reasonable, I would much more appreciate an explanation or at least mentioning of a concept before I get hit by a semi-cryptic line of code. On the other hand, the code is well annotated.
4) Mark uses repetitive examples to illustrate a point. 'This is how to do something', followed by 'This is how to do it better', followed by 'This is how to do it really well'. While illustrative of potential pitfalls, bugs or code deficiencies, this kind of writing makes it impractical to use the book as a reference. Open the book at the wrong page and follow the less than perfect example. Not a good thing. And boring - if I wanted to see it done the wrong way I'd use perl ;-).
5) Mark's statement that C++ virtual methods: 'confuse the hell out of me' (pg. 84) is rather amusing. I'd suggest to skip the amusement as it doesn't give a casual reader a whole lot of confidence in author's understanding of method overloading. Humor me some other ways.
However, this book is about Python, not C++, so I don't hold it against the author :)

In conclusion:
Quite reasonable book for the money, gets you a pretty good jumpstart. Coming from C/C++ background, general programming concepts are not totally lost on me and there are enough practical differences between Python and C++ that this book was worth the read.

The chapters on HTML, XML and SOAP were the primary reason I bought this book. Again, while not covered in depth, I got enough from them to get started with a small practical application.

If you're serious about developing any kind of meaningful code this is a reasonable start but you'll need to dig deeper.

I recently opted for buying Wesley Chun's Core Python Programming as it covers more topics in greater depth (it's the details that matter a lot) in quite comprehensive manner while still very understandable by a novice programmer.

O'Reilley's Python Cookbook by Alex Martelli et. al is also a very good complementary reading exposing quite imaginative ways of using even some very basic capabilities of Python.

nice examples to dive into and get a whole view of the language in very short time. but not recommended for newcomers in programming.

Although this book is only a quick approach to python it makes the reader have a good background to continue learning python on itself.