On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 02:25:12PM -0400, Cole Tuininga wrote:
> Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > I may need to learn Python in the next few weeks. I would like someone
> > to recommend a good book to use to learn Python. I've been writing C and
> > C++ code for 20 years (FORTRAN and BASIC for much longer), so I want a
> > book that is written more for C or C++ programmers.
> 
> I personally found that the "Learning Python" O'Reilly book was pretty
> great.  

I'll second this, with a caveat: Python is not C/C++, and this tends
to be something that the Python community repeats like a mantra.
Things work differently, and you're sometimes better off forgetting
what you know about those languages, and embracing the Python way.
There are times when you can do it the way you'd do it in C, but it's
10 times more efficient to do it in a more "Pythonic" way (either in
terms of coding, or program performance, or both).  But the idioms are
very easy to learn. 

Also, FWIW, the on-line documentation (both the tutorials and the
language reference) are quite good.  Try the tutorials, they'll have
you writing code in no time.

  http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

One last caveat: Python 3.0 does a number of common things very
differently from Python 2.x.  

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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