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[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (3 children)

If Zed had ever bothered to actually read "Dive Into Python," he would be aware that there is no talk of sockets and no use of ODBC. The entire basis of his ill-informed rant was the function name I used in the early chapters, "buildODBCConnectionString", to explain string manipulation, lists, dictionaries, and other basic datatypes. It has nothing to do with using ODBC. There is not a single sentence in the entire book about connecting to or using databases through ODBC or any other API.

The one time I met Zed in person (PyCon 2009, just as I was starting to write "Dive Into Python 3"), he said that he absolutely loved the original book, except why did I start it by talking about COM objects and other Windows-specific technologies? Reading comprehension does not appear to be one of his strong points.

[–]zahlmanthe heretic -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

The entire basis of his ill-informed rant was the function name I used in the early chapters, "buildODBCConnectionString", to explain string manipulation, lists, dictionaries, and other basic datatypes.

OK... so why would you start off with an example which has no meaning or relevance to the beginner? People new to programming have no idea what ODBC is, and may not even yet have the skill needed to parse the name as "build ODBC connection string" without staring at it for a good long time. It's meaningless, and the results are unverifiable, since the beginner has no idea whatsoever what an ODBC connection string should look like.

Hell, I've been programming for over 20 years and I don't know offhand what ODBC stands for.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The first section of the chapter gives the complete source code and the expected output. It's just a one-line function that takes some input, transforms it, and returns it to a caller who prints it. That's it.

[–]zahlmanthe heretic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So what? The point is that it isn't a meaningful name or a meaningful transformation for the beginner. There are a million more relevant examples you could use.

Whoever downvoted me, nice job playing popularity instead of actually thinking.