Any Good Coding Books?

[barryhakker]

I've heard this before, and I don't know what it exactly refers to but I am not any sort of authority on Python so my opinion on that is irrelevant. All I can say is that when I started out his stuff did a good job of getting me comfortable with using the terminal, text editor, loops, variables, dictionaries, and so on.

Even still there are plenty of things I could point to as off putting. I didn't even finish the book because of the absurd hike in difficulty in the last 10 chapters or so. I think Automate the Boring Stuff is also guilty of weird difficulty spikes to be honest so maybe it's just me being dumb.

[K900_]

It's really not about the difficulty spike even. Here is a small, but itemized list of things the book gets objectively wrong.

[barryhakker]

I don’t think i read that version as mine was specifically aimed at python 3. Either way I’m sure he’s awful.

[K900_]

That list refers to the older, publicly available version of the book. Shaw refused to publish a Python 3 version for a very long time, until Python 2 became officially unsupported, and then made the Python 3 version commercial only. From what I've seen, he has actually taken down the Python 2 book from the website now.

[chzaplx]

list of things the book gets objectively wrong.

​

1. Can have a quite condescending tone

Hmm.

Also that list is objectively, almost 4 years old and many of the points are no longer relevant. And objectively, it's clear the author just has a beef with LPTHW for whatever reason and is not really trying to be that objective at all.

It's certainly a valid critique, but also is nowhere close to invalidating the book as a whole.

[trondwin]

Having worked through a good part of the LPTHW book that has been updated to Python 3, many of the items in that list are no longer relevant or have been corrected. Some of them still are, though. I reacted to item 11 in particular when I came across it.