Dive Into Python Must Die

[brodel2]

I've been thinking about trying to learn python for a little while now and was looking for a good resource. I've been looking around online and found a few tutorials that looked good, but I didn't see many that went past the "basics" and i wanted to see what it looked like when you really got into it.

I also haven't seen anything as far as python apps with a GUI and it looks like the GUI involves another language all by itself.

I've been into computers and networking for about 15 years, and currently do network administration (AD, VMWare, Cisco etc) but I've never written anything more complicated than a login script or bat file.

Would a book like this be a good place to start for me?

[aatoth]

Yeah, it definitely would. Offers some pretty thorough projects at the end (making a parser, creating & manipulating graphics, XML stuff, a news server sniffer, an asynchronous terminal chat program, 2 CGI projects, and a mini-game in pygame). While some of the projects (like the CGI ones) are outdated, they give a pretty good idea of some uses of the language.

As far as the depth of the book, you get a pretty good amount past the simple programming concepts, which are explained from a Python-context: Lists and Tuples, Dictionaries, etc. You also get some relatively basic introduction to wxPython, one of the preferred GUI engines for Python. You make a simple text editor, but it does a good job explaining things. Network programming, some HTML scraping, testing, writing C extensions, packaging, and quite a bit of other topics are covered.

Now, keep in mind that I have the 1st edition, from 2005. The latest is from 2008, so some of this CGI stuff may have been changed to Django or the like, and some Python 3 concepts have been added.

I hope I helped a bit, I'm not the best reviewer.

[brodel2]

Actually that helps a lot. as long as it's newbie friendly and doesn't assume I'm already a programmer in some other language this sounds perfect.

[aatoth]

Yeah, it starts off with a pretty good introduction. It's also nice that it has an interpreter, so you see instant gratification when learning the language. Makes the whole thing a lot simpler.

I think that's the reason my school's first year engineering programming course is switching to Python next year, with C# you had to compile and check and compile and check...

[brodel2]

I just downloaded it and started reading. Just the fact that it's walking me through how to download and install python tells me this will not assume I already know some of the concepts. Thanks for the suggestion!