Python in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference

I'm a fossil, but I have actually moved mostly to e-books. However, I purchase this because it looks so lovely sitting in the background of my zoom calls.Not really. Rather expensive for decoration anyway.In reality, having this book is essential because it's like reading the dictionary when I was a kid. I go to look up albatross, but there's albedo - I word I remember hearing but never really knew what it meant. Just as with a map it's the same object you can see from across the room as you walk towards it to checkout one town, with this Nutshell book you can an overview of the whole of Python (through 3.11) filled with references to what tools and approaches are actually viable. If there are four different ways to do something, which makes sense to pursue?The only criticism that I have (not because there aren't omissions or certain passages I'd take issue with - but they are far outweighed by the sound approach and scholarly efficiency) is that there is no section covering what's new. There is, for example, an entire new chapter on Type Annotations - again an example of something I might not have noticed if I was just efficiently using it as a reference to look things up.I'm happy to say I've learned a lot from this book and I'm happy that the drought between the 2nd and 3rd Editions is a fading memory.

Python in a Nutshell is an excellent book for professional developers who have some experience with Python but want to take the leap to being a senior Python developer, Python in a Nutshell is required reading.This is not a book for beginners new to programming, and I’d be hesitant to say that programmers experienced in other languages should use this book to learn Python (but if you’re the bold adventurous sort, have at it.) But if you want to fill out your Python knowledge and go beyond a developer who “kinda sorta” knows Python and copies and pastes Python code from Stack Overflow without much thought, this is a book you need to read.In a way, the title is a bit misleading. “In a nutshell” gives you the idea that this book is small, but it’s actually over 700 pages long. Rather, this book is compact: it doesn’t waste time covering the basics and is quite dense with useful information.The density of this book sometimes works against itself; there were quite a few times I had to carefully parse out the words and could have really used some example code to demonstrate the concepts. I understand why the authors skipped it: not everyone will need the additional explanation for every concept, and providing these examples would have doubled the page count. (For example, the object-oriented chapter led me to take quite a few breaks to test out what I had learned in the Python interactive shell just to make sure I understood what I read.) Suffice it to say, the information in the book is useful and accurate. It’s worth the time it sometimes takes to parse through the difficult concepts.Other times though, it’s a breeze. There’s quite a wide range of topics covered in this book, and I feel like they do a good job going deep enough into each one without losing the big picture. And quite frankly: a lot of the information in this book just plain isn’t easy to find online. Without this book, you’d be chasing endless search result links to blog posts of varying quality, all while still missing out of several topics. The real value of Python in a Nutshell is that it gathers all of this knowledge into one well-written book.Other books similar to Python in a Nutshell include Fluent Python by Luciano Ramahlo, Effective Python by Brett Slatkin, and Serious Python by Julien Danjou. I recommend reading all of these books though; while they have some overlap they complement rather than replace each other. If you’re experienced in a different language but want to learn Python, Python Distilled by David Beazley is a good book to read first for general Python information, and then followed up by Python in a Nutshell.Even as a software engineer with years of experience in Python myself, I kept finding little nuggets of information that has filled in gaps of my Python knowledge that I didn’t know I had. Again, it’s not a book for total beginners but don’t let that scare you off. As long as you have the basics of programming concepts and are generally comfortable writing Python code, go ahead and get started with Python in a Nutshell.

Have two O'Reilly texts that are a month old. Both have started to have pages falling out.These are original O'Reilly printings, not third-party copies.

I came to this book for a quick intro, which is what the term "in a nutshell" means to me. I have in fact read a few "in a nutshell" books, and those were concise and pragmatic.This work is not that. Instead, it is an (complete as far as I can tell) REFERENCE work which guides you through the minutiae of Python - and practically core Python only. It goes really deep on all topics that it covers, sometimes annoyingly (to me) so. Just a small example to give you an idea, most "quick start" books just tell you Python uses indentations for blocks. This book takes 10 pages to explain the lexical structure.So it's an excellent reference for when you get stuck with some advanced code, and to learn intricacies. And it's a great learning tool, too. I frankly didn't even know about chained expressions (a<b<=c>d), or that Python had type definitions and concurrency!There are also later chapters about files, networking, and such, but it stops there. No pandas, Numpy, or machine learning to be found here! If you want to become a true expert in Python, this is the book.

The ebook version has syntax highlighted code snippets. The print version is a black and white funeral of a book.

I'm a bit disgusted with this book. and practically speaking, the other books regarding python aren't doing it justice. Try finding any beginners book explaining the need for a graphics library such as pkinter, or the dozens of other GUI libraries. They just don't discuss it.Any senior citizen programmer desperately desires a modern corollary to Visual Basic; a language that didn't obligate the user to piece together a programming environment or the GUI.Regarding the augmented assignment operators, they are: Operator Addition (+=) Operator Subtraction (-=) Operator Multiplication (*=) Operator Division (/=) Operator Modulus (%=) Operator Exponentiation (**=) Operator Floor Division (//=)These are clever and elegant operators, and the book just mentions them in passing, in plain text, with absolutely no attempt to draw attention to them.a +=5 is a, with 5 added to the original value.this takes the place of a=a+5.I think it's elegant, but the editors apparently wanted to minimize the usage by omitting a table.Now I'm wondering how many other irritating details I will be finding.

This book definitely deserves more positive reviews. I am an intermediate level python user. When I learned python initially only the basics were picked up to get the job done. I have been looking for a book to help me review and learn python more formally.Most of the books that I purchased (including the most popular ones) were either too verbose or abstract or too shallow. This book strikes the right balance between those. Clearly explaining the concepts without making you read multiple pages to just explain one concept but it is done in such a way that no expert level knowledge for the user is NOT assumed as well. So if you are looking for a book to up your python skills , this is the one.Note: I purchased a Kindle edition and did not see any formatting issues yet.