Status Updates From Learning Python

Chapter 28. Really really liking his first principle explanation of OOP. First time I'm not annoyed with the book.

Chapter 26. OOP: The Big Picture is incredibly lucid. He boils down OOP to inheritance, explains how inheritance works, mentions that classes are objects and instances are also objects, shows the logic behind class attributes vs self.

He understands Python deeply, he just has the wrong idea what Learning Python should be pedagogically.

Part V was the most frustrating yet. Seriously considering giving this book 1 star. The constant switching between Python 2 and 3 made Chapter 24 practically unreadable. It's true, Python is a complex language masquerading as a simple language. God bless FP for existing, otherwise there'd be no hope for the future of programming.

Finally finished Part IV. Couldn't be bothered with his benchmarking code and Part IV exercises. I'll study function argument syntax and profiling (https://docs.python.org/3/library/deb...) via Python docs in the future instead.

This guy is the embodiment of “The future is now, old man!” He seems to complain about Python 3 changes everywhere.

Chapter 18. Arguments. I wonder how often Haskellers in practice have to simulate keyword arguments with record passing.

Ch17 was the longest (in terms of how it felt). I definitely learned a lot.

Mark is so repetitive. He has an obsessive desire to make a Ch describe everything under the sun that is relevant to the topic. But that requires forward-referencing, so if he talks about topic X, he says “and this is how you do it with Y, but we haven't learned Y yet, so this is just a preview” multiple times!

What's the difference between this & HtDP? Both seemingly do “from easy to hard”. Except HtDP by that means “identify a small set of essential building blocks, then introduce harder ones” — hence BSL/ISL progression. Where Mark reasons “classes are harder than functions, so I'll talk about functions first”, but coz some function-related topics overlap with classes, he has to mention classes multiple times anyway.

Done with Part III. Learned a bit more, than from Part II, especially that map/filter/zip are themselves iterators (compared to range, which's only an iterable). A Ch takes roughly an hour for me.

Finally, finished Part II. Simultaneously mentions advanced topics too early & doesn't go into details too much. But at least it's more scrupulous than HPfFP. Wouldn't recommend, at least based on the 1st 2 parts. But watching videos on FastAPI & Pydantic today made me realize how much cruft Python has accumulated. Is HtDP for Python even possible?

Fin Chapter 8, Lists and Dictionaries. Slice assignments, del, dictionary views (being set-like no less) are interesting.

Ch7 String Fundamentals was long. But now I somewhat understand % and .format better. Ankifying the entirety of Python will take many days, it seems. It feels so long to crawl through this book. There's 41 Chs, and I only've finished 7.

I wonder when I'll have time to make so many Anki cards for all the intricacies of Python.

Monolingual anglophones underestimate how much i18n sucked in Python 2, but I still remember mucking around with encodings & codecs. Unicode everywhere by default in Python 3 was manna from heaven.

This has been a good place to stop and do some coding problems to get more familiar with the language. Lutz obviously wrote this book for me. Someone not new to programming but wants to know every little fucking detail about Python because they overthink.

The obsessive inclusiveness is so weird. Functions are properly introduced in Ch16, but here in Ch3 he teaches you to use importlib.reload and exec(open(module_name).read()). Wat.

No code yet, just superficial explanations of things like byte code and PVM. A lot of things he mentions like Unladen Swallow, Shed Skin, Psyco, are abandoned. PyPy does support 3.6.9 tho.

Like I said in previous status updates, it's verbose & not beginner friendly at all. However it might be perfect for me: incredibly meticulous & ripe for Ankifying. Defo way better than HPfPP & professionally edited. Gonna skim the book this week, next week reading & taking notes much more closely.

Well my views on this book have changed. I will give it 5 stars very likely. This will be the first book of this kind I read front to back. (well I'm going to stop at chapter 36 likely)