"The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples [...]"
Dive into Python has code examples which use ODBC:
"He has a [...] book that purports to teach people programming that still, in 2010, references a piece of crap technology from the 90's. Yes, he actually used that technology to teach Python in the beginning of his book six years ago. [...]
Meanwhile, Mr. Pilgrim's book hasn't been updated in 6 years even though it's [...] online and people can send him patches. [...]
Dive Into Python isn't just bad because of the use of ODBC, it's also just full of bad initial examples. Take a look at your first Python program and boggle at all the bizarre stuff a beginner has to suddenly comprehend:
- A function, with a giant doc comment right away.
- Weird underscore variables with a bad font making it look like one underscore.
- A list comprehension for-loop to join a string using a format string off a tuple.
- A dict, formatted with backslash chars that aren't even needed.
Holy crap, how in the hell is that a good first example? Even worse is it starts a trend within the book of using ODBC as a theme to teach Python."
I disagree with Zed Shaw here. Ignoring the ODBC problem, Dive into Python is written well for its target audience. This book is written for people who already know how to program. Seeing a function with a doctstring, list comprehensions, etc all at once is exactly the way I wanted to get a feel for what python was about. It served its purpose very well. Now I will admit, some of the examples did get tedious to the point where I skimmed them. But overall the book served its purpose well.
"The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples [...]"
Dive into Python has code examples which use ODBC:
"He has a [...] book that purports to teach people programming that still, in 2010, references a piece of crap technology from the 90's. Yes, he actually used that technology to teach Python in the beginning of his book six years ago. [...]
Meanwhile, Mr. Pilgrim's book hasn't been updated in 6 years even though it's [...] online and people can send him patches. [...]
Dive Into Python isn't just bad because of the use of ODBC, it's also just full of bad initial examples. Take a look at your first Python program and boggle at all the bizarre stuff a beginner has to suddenly comprehend:
- A function, with a giant doc comment right away.
- Weird underscore variables with a bad font making it look like one underscore.
- A list comprehension for-loop to join a string using a format string off a tuple.
- A dict, formatted with backslash chars that aren't even needed.
Holy crap, how in the hell is that a good first example? Even worse is it starts a trend within the book of using ODBC as a theme to teach Python."
Edit: Snipped strong language.