# Paperback: 648 pages
# Publisher: Sams; 3 edition (March 2, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0672328623
# ISBN-13: 978-0672328626
# Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
Amazon.com
Every so ofttimes a aggregation comes along that makes you communicate yourself, “Gee, when was the terminal instance I had my eyes checked?” king M. Beazley’s Python: Essential Reference is foregather such a book. Condensing thousands of pages of Python online substantiation into a auto 319-page softcover, Beazley and his editors utilised the old-college gimmick (often performed in reverse) of dickering with the type filler to foregather a reputed page-limit requirement. The termination is a genuinely condensed creation sound for the occularly well-adjusted (nota bene).
Beazley’s person is Python, a full-featured, freely-redistributable, POSIX-compliant (platforms allow Linux, Unix, Macintosh, and Windows) scripting module that is supported on object-oriented organisation principles. As advertised, Beazley’s maker promulgation (1.5.2) is acquirable from an alas andante machine at www.python.org. The artefact low UNIX (Redhat 5.2) proceeded without incident.
Beazley holds genuine to his catalogic purpose: full 230 pages are formatted as theoretical appendices and indices concealment the accepted litany: built-in duty syntax, database features, OS-level interfaces, cyberspace interfaces, and compiling/profiling/debugging. All references are full annotated and illustrated with warning maker cipher that runs from a pair of lines to a pair of pages. In hair travel with competing scripting languages, Python is extensible and embeddable in C and C++, and with blitzkrieg efficiency, Beazley summarizes these pivotal applicatory issues in the test 30 pages. Python users who are bushed of chasing questions finished hyperlinked online documents module goodness from the cavernous random-access index.
Python the aggregation captures the status of Python the language. Beazley begins with an 86-page précis of Python in the style of Kernighan and Ritchie: likewise short for a newbie tutorial but sufficiency to displace older safekeeping into a scripting module that aspires to the elegance of a compiled language.
Indeed, it is a byte-compiling language. The distinction bytecode=compile(”some_python_script”,”,’exec’)) creates ‘bytecode’ as a minimal executed by exec bytecode. But a five-minute enquiry finished Beazley’s aggregation does not exposit how ‘bytecode’ crapper be cursive into a removed workable file. If composition the byte-compiled cipher to a enter is not possible, Python suffers from the limitations of another scripting languages: the workable is the maker and cannot be unseeable from the user, at diminutive not without whatever difficulty. Despite its extensibility, embeddability, and delightful architecture, Python is aforementioned another scripting languages: pertinent for finding diminutive unpatented problems.
Those old with more ingrained scriptors aforementioned Perl haw ask, “Why Python?” Unlike Perl, Python is a creation of the full object-oriented (OO) era, and its constructs emit organisation principles that plan beyond keystroke shortcuts of the succinct-but-often-arcane Perl. Python creator Guido camper Rossum clean Perl’s idiosyncracies and objectified base accumulation structure, accumulation manipulations, and I/O. With Python, OO is so inbuilt that acquisition Python is equal to acquisition OO. The aforementioned cannot be said of Perl.
Unfortunately, comparisons with another languages are absent from Beazley’s book. Van Rossum, in an embarrassingly self-serving foreword, preemptively asserts that we readers requirement “neither evangelizing nor proselytizing”–after all, we already possess the book–but we do requirement galvanizing and we don’t encounter it. Specifically, we requirement a salutation to the oft-repeated beatific that newborn machine languages are exclusive worth acquisition if they inform us to care our intellection along newborn lines.
Scripting languages, however, are for hurried and filthy projects: hurried to write, cushy to hack, and finally disposable. The primary enmity created by camper Rossum and friends is between the elegance of object-oriented principles and the programme of a quick-hacked script. Sadly, the enmity relic unharmonious in Beazley’s reference. There is lowercase to persuade us that Python has attained its locate in the firmament by dynamical our thinking. But Beazley has presented us such to intend us feat if we hit already condemned the move of faith. –Peter Leopold –This book refers to an discover of indicant or unobtainable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Though Python is a relatively newborn planning language, it has quite a momentous conference owing to its conscious syntax. An astir individual of Python since 1996, Beazley provides plenteous aggregation on the principle of versions 2.0 and 2.1, including syntax, functions, operators, classes, and libraries. This is prototypal and best a reference, so he avoids long discussions of Python’s superiority. Peppered with beatific cipher samples and featuring a consort scheme place with more comprehensive pieces, this denomination should be on assistance in large libraries.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This book refers to the Paperback edition.
Python Essential Reference (3rd Edition) (Developer’s Library)
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