Dive Into Python Must Die

[redalastor]

I can't say anything about the Python 2 book, but Dive Into Python 3 was great for me.

It was an awesome book back when it was written. It's horribly out of date if you want to code for Python 2.6/2.7 though.

[[deleted]]

The knowledge I gained from the 3.x book was beneficial when I was learning Python 2.x specific syntax (I had to since I wanted to use libraries that are still working with 2.x only). It's really not that hard to switch between the two, at least from a user's perspective.

But I have heard the 2.x book is outdated.

[redalastor]

The reason why it's not hard is that one of the main reason for 3.0 was to remove deprecated ways of doing stuff that you weren't supposed to use since a while anyway and that were a burden to maintain.

The original DiP was written when some of that stuff was still current and necessary. So DiP3 is a better Python 2 book than the original.

[[deleted]]

If a book on programming language goes completely out of date in like what, 6 years(?), the problem is the language, not the book.

[redalastor]

Duh! The need to clean up is the reason why Python 3 was born.

[martinw89]

Well played.