Status Updates From Learning Python

It is a reference book. I'll never finish it. :-)

Nueva versión del que tal vez sea el mejor libro para aprender el lenguaje de programación python.
Ahora está actualizado a la versión 3.x y sin la distracción de tener que cubrir la versión deprecada python 2.x.

Save me

A slow read but really useful. Thorough, perhaps a bit too much so.

I think this book will remain on my 'currently reading' till my death (considering the length)!
But let's pause for a moment and get back to the dedication page to appreciate these words once again:
"To Vera.
You are my life."

I love how some writers are so open, brave, and proud about/of their relationships. Unique people...

Python has been learned

Loving it so far.
So many coding lessons I have been working on all afternoon.

Triple Quotes Code Multiline Block Strings

Chapter 6

Other Core Types

Tuiles

Dictionaries

Wondering if I should skip the modules section and move to OOP so I can do OOP problems now then come back. 🤔 Still know I'm going to give this book 5 stars. I'm extremely happy with it.

Finished Chapter 29, Class Coding Details. His explanations of OOP are so intuitive and from 1st principles, Part VI is probably the only reason why I don't want to give this book 1 star, despite my frustrations with previous parts.

I now understand why people found OOP so alluring, & why it's in principle orthogonal to FP (per Odersky), & why it's ultimately about inheritance and nothing else.

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.