The Hacker's Guide to Python

by Julien Danjou

Python is a wonderful programming language that is being used more and more in a lot of different industries. It is fast, flexible, and comes with batteries included.

Most of the books you read about Python teach you the language basics. But once you've learnt them, you are on your own designing your application and discovering best practices.

In this book, we'll see how to leverage Python to efficiently tackle your problems and build great Python applications.

Genres: Technology, Computer Science, Coding, Software

287 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2014

About the author

A Free Software hacker since 1999. He wears multiple hats in the Free and Open Source community, among them: Debian developer, Freedesktop contributor, GNU Emacs committer, the awesome window manager creator, Project Technical Leader for OpenStack Telemetry and contributor to Python.

For the last few years, he has been hacking using Python a lot, especially when working on OpenStack, a cloud-computing platform. During that time, He had the chance to work with many fabulous Python hackers, and learned a lot from them and the surrounding community.

Reviews

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful; in some ways it felt more like a collection of blog posts than a classical book, but as someone who writes Python quite a bit I still learned a lot, so the lack of overall flow was fine. Certainly not a beginner book; if you are new to Python you will probably be lost on page 3.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very current (2014) treatment of Python covering a range of useful topics.

[박은정 Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

이런 류의 중고급 기술을 정리한 책들은 정말 귀중하다.

다만 아쉬운 점이 몇 가지 있다:
1. 일반적인 best practice라기보다는 자사 철학을 주장할 때는 조금 불편했다. 그 때도 완전히 말이 안되는 말을 하는 것은 아니었지만.
2. ctypes 등 표준 라이브러리 좀 더 다뤘으면 더 좋았을 듯.

[Tony Poerio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of very practical tips and tricks for taking your Python programming to the next level. The section on the python AST and Hy was really mind opening. Basically Hy is a Lisp variation that you can use within Python projects, made possible by hacking the Python Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).

Generally the book is a quick read, but full of little things that the author learned by using Python on very large and complex projects. Worth a read because it'll open your eyes to what's possible with Python, in a succinct and elegant way.

Not life changing, but certainly very interesting. Easy 4/5.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book targeting people who are already comfortable with the language. It aims to give the lay of the land on a variety of topics: what's the current status, what's the history if relevant, what are the current libraries and best practices. I enjoyed the end of chapters interviews with an expert from the community about that chapter's topic.

[Shashank Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing content ! A must read for anyone who is/would be working with Python for anything more than one-off short scripts !

[Israel Fermín Montilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book on python, even if you're an experienced developer you'll get to learn a couple of things.

[Sebastian Godoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of good practices for not so easy to solve topics in python, very recommended to improve how you write code with python

[Gaël Chamoulaud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book written by a colleague! Worth to read it now!