On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:12:19 -0800 (PST), [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 12 jan, 21:04, Landon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> One thing I wonder about is the examples these books use to teach the >> concepts. I found myself really attached to K&R because the end of >> section projects were utilities that I would find be able to find >> useful in day to day work such as a version of wc and a program that >> would take collapse all consecutive whitespace in a document into one >> space. I could just use the projects from K&R, but I imagine a Python >> book would have a better selection that highlight Python's abilities. > > It wouldn't make any sens to port the K&R stuff to Python - different > languages, different uses, different problems... I mean, C is a low- > level language, mostly useful for low-level system programming, while > Python is a very high level language mostly useful for application > programming and Q&D scripting.
I tend to ignore exercises, sadly, but back in the days before Perl, and on Unix, it was useful to write small utilities like that in C. Maybe the K&R exercises reflect that. (And the 'K' in K&R became the 'k' in awk, so these people were clearly very interested in this application area -- and interested in easier ways to do it than by C programming.) Unix bigot mode: it seems to me to be harder and more tedious to learn programming in a GUI environment like Windows. On Unix small home-grown filter-like programs are useful: you have a good shell to run them in, and you have a wealth of other utilities to connect them to via pipes. /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu \X/ snipabacken.se> R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
