Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book will teach you Python if you have a lot of patience and are willing to wade through many pages of text to get information. The author wastes a lot of ink stating things like "I'll introduce you to topic XYZ, but you will have to wait until a later chapter to go into detail." Or introducing a topic and then declaring it is outside the books (1216 page) scope. Here's an example from page 85: "Text pattern matching is an advanced tool outside this book's scope, but readers with backgrounds in other scripting languages may be interested to know that to do pattern matching in Python, we import a module called re." Pattern matching is a critical feature of any scripting language. I was surprised to see such an important topic thrown away. The book is divided into sections. I've put page counts and a summary description of the content to further describe the glacial pace of the book: Part 1: Getting Stared: Pages 1- 72 72 pages to tell you how to run a Python program. Part 2: Types and Operations 73-258 186 pages to introduce Python types (strings, numbers, sequences, etc) Page 3: Statements and Syntax - 259-392 If statements are not introduced until Part3. At this point I gave up and started reading the online tutorial.