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Book missing from python line-up?

Brett g Porter BgPorter at NOacmSPAM.org
Thu May 25 10:28:50 EDT 2000 
"Nick Bower" <N.Bower at ses.curtin.edu.au> wrote in message
news:392CB9B3.F5484CCB at ses.curtin.edu.au...

> If one of Python's goals is to be a good teaching language, shouldn't
> there be a book about OOP using Python, rather than the current books on
> Python with only chapters on OOP?
>
> What do other people think about this?  Am I wrong in thinking there is
> nothing available?
>
> FYI - I'm thinking of picking up Bruce Eskil's "Thinking in Java" for
> myself, but wish there was something comparable in Python.
There are a couple of issues here --
When I decided to learn Python, my goal was to pick up a 'little language.'
I had narrowed it down to a choice between the 2 P languages. A quick flip
through some books at the bookstore made my choice easy. However, I was in
no way expecting what I found (and continue to find) in Python. It's not a
'little' language at all (in the pejorative sense).  It's dangerous to
interpret GvR's 'CP4E' such that 'Everyone' only goes downward -- the
language has to serve 'real' programmers/software engineers too. A serious,
but accessible book covering object oriented _design_ and programming in
Python could be a boon in attracting people who might otherwise dismiss
Python as Just Another Scripting Language.

As has already been pointed out, Python's object model is relatively free of
the weird 'gotchas' that plague the other mainstream object-languages. By
removing the need to cover the details of C++'s memory management issues, or
virtual function dispatching, or Java's ability to inherit multiple
interfaces but not multiple implementations, you're free to do more with
discussing the much more subtle task of analyzing problems in terms of
objects and then cleanly, quickly, and correctly implementing those objects.
The clean nature of Python means that the book would be immediately useful
even to non-python programmers (I love the Gang of Four 'Design Patterns'
book, but hate the Smalltalk examples because I need to translate them into
C++ before I can really make sense of them -- anyone can read Python code,
even if they need to pretend that it's pseudocode).

So, I'd rather see a book on "Object Oriented Design and Programming using
Python" than a "Python book about Objects."

My US$0.02.
BgP
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