Two weeks back I got Core Python Programming. I'm 400 pages in and no real complaining. One thing, however, slightly irritates me.

This thing is the "evangelizing" of Python. Of course I did some research before getting the book. Reading Python book reviews I noted that several books had reviews from irritated users. Some were irritated because the books sucked, others because of this "evangelizing".

I don't mind if the book notes that some things are easier to do in Python than in some other language. But I begin to slightly mind when I get the impression that the author only compares Python to other languages when Python does something more easily. And notes like "Imagine doing this in C++ or Java?!?" don't actually help the case either.

So...

Is Python just THAT awesome that when you know Python, you know it all? Or is it just the fact that preaching what you practise helps bring money in your purse? Is this the case with all languages? Am I paranoid?

Ps.

I haven't had the guts to go check the official Python forums (if there is such) lest the Python maniacs infect me.

The thing is (being a Python freak myself) that once you learn Python, you really notice the "problems" other languages have. Some of the better books or web sites will show you how similar code looks in Python, C++, Java, or other comparisons and you realize that Python takes a lot of the grunt work out of coding.

A good comparison is coding with a text editor and coding using Visual Studio. With a text editor (let's say Notepad) you have to do everything yourself: indenting, completing brackets, writing out the full object's path name, etc. VS does a lot of that stuff itself so it's easier for you to code.

Python is very similar to this. Lists, dictionaries, and tuples are all a part of the language; you don't have to mess with hand coding linked lists anymore. The forced indentation to set off block code forces you to have a clean structure (after a few days you get used to it and looking at other languages can get frustrating). A big benefit is that you can write short scripts to do simple things, write "glue" structures to combine blocks of other code, write full blown programs, write GUI programs, and work easily with C/C++ due to the inherent nature of Python.

And because it's an interpreted language, you immediately see the results. You can write short code blocks in the interpreter to make sure they give the right results before you put them into your main program. It also makes debugging a lot easier. There's no code/compile/run/debug cycle; you just run the program and immediately see what it does. If there's an error, the error messages make it pretty easy to see what went wrong. It's also incredibly easy to make a change and see the result; very rarely do you have to use a debugger since you can just keep rerunning the program to see the results and any error messages.

So, that's why many writers come across as "Pythonistas"; the language really is that good. You'll find the same thing if you look into Ruby. It's very similar to Python and many people swear by it for the same reasons. While I'm at it, IronPython and IronRuby are available for .NET coding, so even Microsoft realises the value of these languages.

In regards to the book, I've never read it so I can't comment on it. However, I can recommend the various O'Reilly Python books (Learning Python and Programming Python) and also Python How to Program from Dietel and Dietel. These are the same books I own and I refer to them constantly.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't plug my own tutorial series here on GIDNetwork. I've combined information from the various books, tried to include my own experiences so it's a little easier to digest and hopefully strips away a lot of the evangalising.

Hope that helps you.