Because this book is recommended on the Python.org website, it will attract a lot of new Python programmers. It begins in chapter 4 with a discussion of the Python interpreter. Many of the exercises can be entered directly into the Python interpreter. The exercises are short, but convey the basic idea of what the author is attempting to demonstrate.

The first demonstrated line of code consists (appropriately enough) of the following:

>>>print “We are the knights who say ‘Ni’!”

The book is filled with Pythonisms from the Monty Python TV series and motion pictures.

The individual chapters of the book cover the basic elements of the Python language: types and operators, strings, lists, dictionaries, tuples, files, statements, documenting your code, and making a program. Chapter 13, “Making a Program,” seemed out of order because the author was describing short programs starting in chapter 4, “The Python Interpreter.”

Chapter 12, “Documenting Your Code,” gives an introduction on how to embed comments and documentation directly into a Python program. Jackson gives a link to Mark Pilgrim’s free book Dive into Python, which gives readers a link into pydoc. Pydoc is interesting software because it can extract comments from a Python program and place them into a readable format. The extracted comments can be read and searched by pydoc, which is similar to Unix man pages.

Incidentally, Dive into Python is a changing book. There is a version out called Dive Into Python 3. The “Dive” books are for experienced programmers.

Jackson’s book has problems with typographical errors in some of the programming code mentioned in the text. Catching these errors in published programming code is difficult, and this requires a proofreader who is familiar with the programming language that is being described.

The book is intended for beginners. Jackson encourages the reader to use the Python shell for short exercises. This can get tedious with more than five lines of code, and correcting a typo gets cumbersome. The solution is to use a Python integrated development environment (IDE). Jackson gives a brief overview of IDEs in chapter 4. The best ones are Eric (which you have to add to your installation) or IDLE (which is available with the Python standard library).

The book does not have any references for modules that are included in the Python standard library. Documentation for them can be accessed through help (“module_name”) within the Python shell or by issuing the command pydoc module_name at the command line.

The layout of the book and the comparison of Python with other programming languages would make this book confusing to a student learning to program for the first time. Overall, this book gives a good introduction to the Python language for people who are already familiar with writing computer programs.

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