REVIEW - Python Cookbook - 3rd Edition


Title:

Python Cookbook

3rd Edition

Author:

David Beazley, Brian K. Jones

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media (2013)

Pages:

706pp

Reviewer:

Paul Floyd

Reviewed:

March 2021

Rating:

★★★☆☆


Verdict: Recommended

Before I get started, one important thing is that this book covers exclusively Python 3 (it does say on the top of the cover ‘Recipes for Mastering Python 3’. So look elsewhere if you need to get a reference for Python 2.

Unfortunately, the Python project that I was working on only lasted a couple of months (something ‘Machine Learning’, surprise surprise) and I haven’t used Python in anger since. So even though I read the book from cover to cover, I haven’t put any of the ideas into practice. This limits my ability to judge how practical these recipes are.

The book is split into 15 chapters, covering all aspects of the language and a few more specific applications. I’d have liked to have seen a bit more numpy and scipy, but you can’t expect all libraries to get covered. The chapters are split into recipes – I make it 262 of them. That makes an average of a bit over two pages per recipe. A few of the recipes are longer – banquets as it were – running up to 15 pages, covering items like parsing and event driven i/o.

The text and examples are concise and easy to follow. One thing that I appreciated was the occasional anti-example with advice along the lines ‘that is the non-pythonic way of doing it, this has X and Y problems and this is a better way of doing it’. I thought that this would be helpful for occasional dabblers like myself. I had one niggle – the repeated use of the word ‘subtle’ for any problem that is tricky. I suppose that this is fashionable in open source circles, but I just found it annoying. Get a thesaurus, for Pete’s sake.

Website www.oreilly.com/library/view/python-cookbook-3rd/9781449357337/






Your Privacy

By clicking "Accept Non-Essential Cookies" you agree ACCU can store non-essential cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

Current Setting: Non-Essential Cookies REJECTED


By clicking "Include Third Party Content" you agree ACCU can forward your IP address to third-party sites (such as YouTube) to enhance the information presented on this site, and that third-party sites may store cookies on your device.

Current Setting: Third Party Content EXCLUDED



Settings can be changed at any time from the Cookie Policy page.