Python Essential Reference (OTHER NEW RIDERS)
by David M. Beazley, Guido Van Rossum

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Paperback - 319 pages 1 edition (October 19, 1999)
New Riders Publishing; ISBN: 0735709017 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.71 x 8.95 x 5.98
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 2,967
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Number of Reviews: 6

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Editorial Reviews (8) Customer Reviews (6)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Every so often a book comes along that makes you ask yourself, "Gee, when was the last time I had my eyes checked?" David M. Beazley's Python: Essential Reference is just such a book. Condensing thousands of pages of Python online documentation into a compact 319-page softcover, Beazley and his editors used the old-college trick (often performed in reverse) of dickering with the font size to meet a putative page-limit requirement. The result is a truly condensed product fit for the occularly well-adjusted (nota bene).

Beazley's subject is Python, a full-featured, freely-redistributable, POSIX-compliant (platforms include Linux, Unix, Macintosh, and Windows) scripting language that is based on object-oriented design principles. As advertised, Beazley's source release (1.5.2) is available from an unfortunately slow server at www.python.org. The installation under Linux (Redhat 5.2) proceeded without incident.

Beazley holds true to his catalogic purpose: fully 230 pages are formatted as technical appendices and indices covering the standard litany: built-in function syntax, database features, OS-level interfaces, Internet interfaces, and compiling/profiling/debugging. All references are fully annotated and illustrated with example source code that runs from a couple of lines to a couple of pages. In lock step with competing scripting languages, Python is extensible and embeddable in C and C++, and with blitzkrieg efficiency, Beazley summarizes these crucial practical issues in the final 30 pages. Python users who are tired of chasing questions through hyperlinked online documents will benefit from the expansive random-access index.

Python the book captures the orderliness of Python the language. Beazley begins with an 86-page précis of Python in the fashion of Kernighan and Ritchie: too brief for a newbie tutorial but enough to propel old hands into a scripting language that aspires to the elegance of a compiled language.

Indeed, it is a byte-compiling language. The line bytecode=compile("some_python_script",'','exec')) creates 'bytecode' as a token executed by exec bytecode. But a five-minute investigation through Beazley's book does not describe how 'bytecode' can be written into a separate executable file. If writing the byte-compiled code to a file is not possible, Python suffers from the limitations of other scripting languages: the executable is the source and cannot be hidden from the user, at least not without some difficulty. Despite its extensibility, embeddability, and pleasing architecture, Python is like other scripting languages: appropriate for solving small nonproprietary problems.

Those familiar with more established scriptors like Perl may ask, "Why Python?" Unlike Perl, Python is a product of the fully object-oriented (OO) era, and its constructs reflect design principles that aspire beyond keystroke shortcuts of the succinct-but-often-arcane Perl. Python creator Guido van Rossum cleansed Perl's idiosyncracies and objectified basic data structure, data manipulations, and I/O. With Python, OO is so intrinsic that learning Python is equivalent to learning OO. The same cannot be said of Perl.

Unfortunately, comparisons with other languages are missing from Beazley's book. Van Rossum, in an embarrassingly self-serving foreword, preemptively asserts that we readers need "neither evangelizing nor proselytizing"--after all, we already own the book--but we do need galvanizing and we don't find it. Specifically, we need a response to the oft-repeated wisdom that new computer languages are only worth learning if they teach us to organize our thinking along new lines.

Scripting languages, however, are for quick and dirty projects: quick to write, easy to hack, and ultimately disposable. The essential tension created by van Rossum and friends is between the elegance of object-oriented principles and the utility of a quick-hacked script. Sadly, the tension remains unresolved in Beazley's reference. There is little to convince us that Python has earned its place in the firmament by changing our thinking. But Beazley has given us much to get us going if we have already taken the leap of faith. --Peter Leopold

Jon Corbet, Linux Weekly News
Despite the increasingly high profile of the Python programming language, good books on the subject have been frustratingly scarce. The original Internet Programming With Python has been out of print for some time, and O'Reilly's offering has been felt by many to be not quite up to the level of that publisher's other books. So a new book about Python is certain to raise some degree of interest. Happily, the Python Essential Reference by David Beazley is a high quality work which should be well... read more

Book Description
The goal of the Python Essential Reference is to concisely describe the Python programming language and its large library of standard modules, collectively known as the Python programming "environment." It is arranged into four major parts. First a brief tutorial and introduction is presented, then an informal language reference will cover lexical conventions, functions, statements, control flow, datatypes, classes, and execution models. The third part will cover the Python library, and the... read more

From the Publisher
This informal language reference is arranged into four major parts: a brief tutorial, an introduction to Python; an informal language reference that covers lexical conventions, functions, statements, control flow, datatypes, classes, and execution models; the Python library; and the Python C API used to write Python extensions. read more

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Model programmer's reference for a clean, practical language
Reviewer: Stavros Macrakis   from Cambridge, Massachusetts      January 9, 2000
This excellent reference concisely covers the Python language and libraries. It is a model of what a reference should be: well-produced, tightly written, comprehensive without covering the obsolete or arcane. I even like the small type face. Peter Leopold's pompous 'official' review is off the mark in a variety of ways. For instance, the reason there aren't comparisons to other languages is precisely that this is _reference_, not advocacy or tutorial. Leopold's ill-tempered criticisms of the language itself are hardly relevant to the quality of the book; they also happen to be incorrect. Python _does_ support bytecode-only distribution. Python _is not_ a cleansed version of Perl. Python _is not_ only for quick and dirty projects. Python _does_ provide the abstraction mechanisms and libraries to solve serious problems in a maintainable way, as long as execution efficiency isn't paramount.
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A most wonderful Python reference!

Reviewer: Luby Liao from University of San Diego, San Diego, CA      January 7, 2000

A most wonderful Python reference in 319 pages

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Superb reference
Reviewer: redmond   from NJ, USA      December 21, 1999
If you're familiar with Python programming, and want a beautifully presented, concise reference, this is the book for you. If you're new to Python, but experienced with C/C++ and perl, this book is a great way to pick up the Python sytax and libraries (love that Occam syntactic indenting!) Beginners should try something like O'Reilly's "Learning Python", and pick up "Python Essential Reference" once they're familiar with the basics.
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Invaluable Reference
Reviewer: A reader      November 30, 1999
Though it's 90% unoriginal content (it's compiled from documentation available online), this book will more than pay for itself. It has proven to me to be a solid resource for getting my first real-world Python projects done.
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