Violent Python Quick Thoughts

I eagerly pre-ordered the book Violent Python
and while I’ve only had a chance to go completely through chapter 1 and pick through chapter 6, I wanted to write a quick post with my thoughts on the book.

Chapter one is called introduction to Python and while the author starts off showing an example of a list, of a dictionary etc. the content quickly escalates into projects it has you work on. I’ve done a tiny bit of python coding in the past but my python was extremely rusty. Chapter one definitely helped shake the rust off.

What chapter one would not be good for is teaching someone python that has no programing experience whatsoever. One perfect example is the indentation that is such a fundamental part of python is never addressed. That could be awfully confusing to someone with zero experience. I understand people with zero programming experience are not the target demographic for a book like this; it’s just one caveat to consider before recommending the book. I’ve already recommended the book to multiple  people but there are a few I haven’t recommended it to because I think they would experience some frustration due do their lack of experience.

The old recommendation would be to get an introduction to python book first but I’m not sure that’s necessary anymore. There are enough websites out there with free “learn python” courses out there that do a fantastic job on getting people started. Spending a few hours with one of those courses getting comfortable with python syntax, loops, basic libraries etc. would prepare someone to start Violent Python
.

If you’re at all interested in the content contained in Violent Python
the book is a must read. I had a blast creating and then modifying the projects in chapter one and then I jumped to chapter 6 to help me with a web scraping project I needed to write. The book has been fantastic and I’ll be making several more posts about it but I wanted to get some quick thoughts “down on paper”.

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