Greetings, My copy of the second edition of Chun's "Core Python Programming" just arrived from Amazon on Friday. What really jumped out at me is an interesting feature about how it sequences its topics, namely, (user-defined) functions are not introduced until chapter 11, fully 400 pages into the book. This contrasts strongly with a traditional "Introduction to language X" book which has a chapter sequence roughy like:
Chapter 1) Intro - Hello World Chapter 2) Variables Chapter 3) If, if-else Chapter 4) Loops Chapter 5) Functions and/or subroutines The exact details vary from book to book and language to language of course, but usually the above topics are covered in the first 100-150 pages since it is hard to do anything interesting until all of these tools are under your belt. Chun's book by contrast is able, on the strength of Python's built-in functions, to cover a fair amount of relatively interesting things (dictionaries, file IO, exception handling, etc.) before introducing user-defined functions. I don't want to read too much into this, but the mere fact that it is possible to write a Python book in this fashion seems to confirm the "batteries are included" philosophy of Python. Perhaps there is less need to learn how to roll your own batteries as soon as possible. -John Coleman -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
