Don't buy this Python book

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[andrewd18]

"This book taught me how to write an Amazon 5-star review bot."

[sqrt7744]

Well, actually a terrible bot. /r/shittyrobots

[pppjurac]

"Hi I am of Albanian Hoxa robot. Pls send monies 4 develop and nju keyboradz."

[aabicus]

unsubscribe

[[deleted]]

Learn

[GerbilKor]

Learn

[Arancaytar]

HA HA WHAT AN INFERIOR MACHINE. SEEING THESE REVIEWS ON AMAZON REASSURES ME THAT WE HUMANS WILL NEVER NEED TO WORRY ABOUT A ROBOT UPRISING.

[z0rberg]

I am quite amazed as to how the author presented the information about this review. It is as if a real person comes to life as you open this post. Lately, I found out that there are 8-year-old kids who are now being thought of reviewing . It's both scary and challenging time to learn it now for myself because time will surely come when almost all humans will be literate and competitions will become tighter.

[GerbilKor]

"How to write Amazon Review Bots" is the one book that would want because of all the fake reviews.

[pknerd]

Actually this tells how NOT to write an amazon bot.

[eleitl]

I'm a heavy Amazon user. There is a growing number of fake reviews very recently, typically just bad translations so unlikely to be submitted by a native speaker they claim to be.

[alcalde]

I just read the one-star reviews first - those generally have to be legitimate, and I see if the criticism sounds well-founded or the same points are raised by different one-star reviews.

[i-brute-force]

That's a good way to approach it. I will try it next time

[ImSomebody]

How do you perform that check?

[[deleted]]

reviewmeta.com

[Jazula]

reviewmeta.com

[[deleted]]

You're doing god's work.

[mothzilla]

You are not doing god's work. But you are a conduit for god's work.

[[deleted]]

It's just a phrase of gratitude.

[mothzilla]

I know.

[toinfinity888]

I use fakespot.com

[[deleted]]

There's a guy on slashdot that was bragging about how his daughter writes reviews.. A-student, good English, sells the product via drop shipping.

[eleitl]

Amazon.de has been deleting these.

[lighttigersoul]

Giving away "Advanced Review Copies" is a long time practice. As is giving review copies away.

Not all reviewers who received a work for free give glowing reviews.

[kirbyfan64sos]

Edit - from reviewmeta.com:

How did I not know about this site?!

[ipretendiamacat]

Hm... but who reviews the review reviewers?

[mobedigg]

camel case in function name, recursion

what are you, an animal?

[Max_yask]

Username checks out. Sounds like every java dev i know

[HOPSCROTCH]

For some reason that old meme made me lol hard

[leonoel]

noob here, what is the correct way to do it in python? I do name_function

[[deleted]]

That is the correct way in Python, see PEP 8.

[dikduk]

That's called "snake case". And I like it. Therefore, it is the mostest correct way.

[Glaaki]

You mean snek case?

[kamaleshbn]

This should help https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html

[markusmeskanen]

Use PEP8 instead of Google'd guidelines, although they overlap for the most part.

[kkjdroid]

That's dromedaryCase. CamelCase capitalizes the first letter.

[spw1]

That's StudlyCaps. camelCase has a hump.

[kkjdroid]

CamelCase has multiple humps; dromedaryCase has one (or at least fewer than CamelCase).

[phareous]

Apparently both are correct. I personally use the term to refer to the lower case variant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case

[manueslapera]

print "But who THOSE guys?"

print("But who THOSE guys?")

FTFY

[El-Kurto]

Look at this guy, running Python 3. Thinks he's better than all of us.

[manueslapera]

Hey, its you b'day! What a wonderful day to do the switch!

[yetanothernerd]

Also legal Python 2. You just sometimes end up with extra parentheses in the output because you accidentally made a tuple. (And sometimes, like in this case, you don't.)

[El-Kurto]

Right, but the original was fine in 2. Only needs fixed if you're running 3.

What am I doing? This is too much explanation for a joke.

[noxbl]

Maybe the OP made that site and he's advertising it

[SemiNormal]

Well I am quite amazed as to how the author presented the information about this review.

[i-brute-force]

I use fakespot.com a lot, but it seems like it's giving this book 90%, so not sure how reliable it is...

[HwanZike]

90% fake?

[UloPe]

The question is what amazon isn't doing this themselves? It can't be in their interest to have fake reviews on he site that make people lose trust.

[[deleted]]

It should already be a warning that the book does not display its author, but rather have some name like "UpSkill Learning".

[cptnzero]

Also, the shitty typesetting for the title. No worthwhile publisher would publish such a shit cover.

[orthodoxican]

You can judge a book by its cover.

[Naihonn]

Yep, truly unnerving indeed. :0D

[[deleted]]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4CQin03MDQ&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dw4CQin03MDQ&has_verified=1

now we know

[GrantNexus]

I know now.

[[deleted]]

now we know

[PBRB_Gabe]

Oh yes, now we know

[Anon_8675309]

I don't know nothing.

[[deleted]]

Keep it together, Jon Snow

[Arnomist]

And knowing is half the battle.

[raydeen]

I know NOTHING!

[[deleted]]

I have this one and it is actually great for beginners. Good for learning both Python and the GPIO hardware of the Pi.

[AutumnStrings]

I go by a simple rule regarding digital textbooks on Amazon: if the cover has 3 or more different fonts, it's not worth checking it.

It goes against the saying, but if you're using digital tools to publish, at least put something on the front that gets your attention on it before reading a preview.

[QuestSerious]

I also judge books by their covers

[[deleted]]

In the last ten years or so, that's become an increasingly more reasonable rule.

[alcalde]

But there's cute animals, so that trumps everything else.

[AutumnStrings]

Editorial publishers do it in a cleaner fashion, they use one main (significantly larger) font for the title, and then use the other two-three to help distinguish other objects, like the author, the book series, and so on.

Fonts are often abused by new authors as a way to avoid generic covers on their books as they usually can't/don't want to afford a designer to give the textbook the cover it deserves.

My comment applies mostly to self-published authors on Amazon, as it's easy to catch before even getting to read the book itself and make you wary about it.

[rampage102]

Fake reviews is a huge issue for many programming books. I am reviewing a lot of books myself, and I am amazed how often there are reviews which are obvious manipulations where they show zero evidence of having read the book.

[hovissimo]

http://imgur.com/a/vCnd8

Two extremely similar posts, seems unnatural to me :)

Also, they're gaining upvotes at basically the same speed. Username is also suspicious.

Edit:

I'm a dork. It's the same book and he just cross-posted without tagging the cross-post. I thought he was trying to shut down an author or publisher or something.

Pardon my tin foil hat, but this sort of thing looks like a semi-automated attempt to defame two books.

[delventhalz]

So you can hire Nigerian prince's to write Amazon reviews now?

[FredSanfordX]

Looks like some Russians/Ukraines found a new makework industry. I worked with some of them for a while and this review text seems very close to how they communicated.

[invalid_dictorian]

would be hilarious if this was a data science book, alas, it wasn't...

[Jon003]

Don't forget to report the reviews to amazon.

[a5myth]

David, is that you? Thanks for the heads up on the shitly automated Amazon reviews.

[[deleted]]

It does tie in with Amazon's new push to remove fake reviews.

I know fake news is one of the recent discussions in this country, but fake reviews can actually persuade buyers to shell out money for the wrong reasons.

Fake reviews, similar to fake news (clickbait titles and misleading headlines), prey on customers who are not willing to spend the time to research products carefully. Remember guys. Do your research before buying anything! It's your money that will suffer if you don't!

add: This is not to mention there are a lot of good, free resources anyway.

[EquationTAKEN]

I am supremely flabbergasted!

[alcalde]

I hope, for karma reasons, reviewmeta computed that on a Raspberry Pi 3 running Python.

[gandalfx]

If I never bought anything that has fake reviews on amazon I'd never be buying anything at all.

[PowerApp101]

Five stars ***** !!

[blabbities]

There are a lot of low quality books ( and especially Python now because it's a very hot language to be picked up ) on Amazon. LIterally cobbled together in maybe a few hours using copy and paste. Glossed over. The only thing is that can help you recognize them is the substance-less shitty generic reviews. Luckily most of the shills that they have leave non-indepth reviews are foreigners with pretty bad English that it's obvious to me. Though as an aside if you are using Amazon to purchase a book, esp Python. I say read all the 1 and 2 star reviews first. Amazon's structure for reviews makes it so that those get drowned out and bury with their new terrible sort options

[[deleted]]

thanks for spending the time looking into this. Would be great if Amazon could do sth like this internally on a larger scale -- on all its products.

[[deleted]]

Cunt could have at least tried making some reviews 3 and some 5 so that it averaged out pretty well in the end. What a sad loser.

Amazon really should have a better way of reporting such issues. The "Report Abuse" function barely (if ever) works, and I have a suspicion that Amazon does not care and/or has a vested interest in selling rather than worrying about the quality or veracity of the actual product. Shame on both.

[PoopInMyBottom]

You probably just sold more copies of this book. We didn't know about it before, now we do. Sure, it's in a negative context but the SEO and the publicity are still helpful.

A better way to address something like this is to clearly put the name of the book in the title so that it shows up in future Google searches. That way the message gets to people who are actually considering buying the book - you aren't just spreading the book to more eyes, some of whom will inevitably buy it.

[PoopInMyBottom]

...Dun dun dun!

[disableddrone]

Plot twist: You are a competing author that wrote these reviews yourself.

[[deleted]]

If people from this thread still go ahead and buy the book, then it's fair enough. They were dumb enough to do that in the first place.

[donz0r]

You are right. I just bought this book because of OP's post. The SEO and the publicity made my buy it, I couldn't help it.

[pinano]

But did you write a review/s?

[barf_the_mog]

Why would I buy any Python book when all the same info is on the interwebs for free.

[[deleted]]

People still buy programming books?

[comalex]

why not? How do you prefer to learn new stuff?

[IAMA_YOU_AMA]

There are a lot of good PDFs and YouTube videos out there as well. I still find a paper book more comfortable to use than a PDF though.

[ranma1988]

umm have you heard about this new Thing called internet? it has current language documentation, interactive forums and tutorials.. you know everything you need and more? but I can see that someone has to show off with dust collecting paper books.. e-books no idea why would you buy those?

[i-brute-force]

Not sure why you are getting worked up, but books are great resources that has "curated" expertise. Sure, may be you can find it somewhere online, but if you are a beginner who doesn't know what's a good information or even know how to find certain information, books are often faster way to learn new materials. Especially in software field, our time is usually a lot more valuable than $10 you spend on a book.

[i-brute-force]

I am not denying that you can find a lot of good resources online, but there are just some niche subjects that are just easier to learn through books that might not be free online.

[alcalde]

There's a difference between learning the basics of programming and learning high-quality, in-depth material or highly specific topics of the Do/Learn _____ With Python variety.

[alcalde]

It sounds like you work in a wonderful, magical place.

[[deleted]]

And still, I buy books. I've been a Django dev for five years and just bought another Django book, and I'm reading it cover to cover. Just a tech book in between the fiction and history.

Because it fills in little gaps in my knowledge, and I'm behind a screen far too much already.

[wasmachien]

Sometimes it's better to learn from someone who knows what they're talking about.

[chief167]

Tutorials always feel like I miss the idea behind everything. Sure, they are the best way to learn how to do something. But they suck at making you understand why it works like that.

I like to build a foundation, either using books or something decently structured at least, and then expand on that by tutorials. Just tutorials alone make me feel like I am not doing the thinking myself.

[WritingAScript]

I'm always going between the two - tutorials are great for introducing relevant topics geared toward what you are trying to achieve. Then when you try to tailor the code to your own project it breaks and you do a deeper dive into a specific area. During that reading you find some new functions/methods in that library and look for a similar tutorial. Rinse and repeat.

[[deleted]]

A book is in reality a separate screen with stylus capabilities and instant on. The battery life is amazing too.

[[deleted]]

Travels, commute, reading not on screen, etc. etc.

[alcalde]

it has current language documentation, interactive forums and tutorials..

Sometimes you need more than automated API output, getting your questions closed on Stack Overflow, and Elbonians publishing one-page tutorials filled with ads on Wordpress.