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Deitel and Deitel Book...

Alan Gauld alan.gauld at bt.com
Thu Feb 28 09:59:11 EST 2002 
Ron Stephens wrote:

> Well, let's see, I bought this 1292 page book from Amazon a week ago for
> $72. This is the most I have ever paid for a computer book. 


I've paid more but I'm glad that I got my complimentary copy
as a reviewer! Its a lot of money for paper!

> This book is one of the most enjoyable I have ever read. 


I'm glad you like it, books are very much a personal
preference kind of thing.

> the paper is the finest in any Python book yet; 


I assume you mean finest in the sense of thinest?
My copy feels like tissue paper...

> languages, and I sort of expected them to half-heartedly do a me-too
> book by just applying the same old formula to a Python version.


I think thats what they have done, looking at their C++ and
Java books they are very similar. But if those books work
then why not?

> Regular Expressions, and Unicode. There are even excellent and extensive
> appendixes 


One of my criticisms of the book is that the HTML and XHTML 
appendices really could have been rolled together - they are 
obviously cut n paste copies with minor differences where 
appropriate - there are whole pages with only a couple of
words different! But thats how you get 1300 pages in a book
I guess!

> very best college text books  I have encountered. Even the summaries
> after each chapter are useful; 


Here I agree, I did think te summaries were useful - for the 
first half of the book I just read the summary sections
without reading the main text,  then when I got to the
chapters I really wanted to read I read both.
That worked OK.

> I am excited.


In that case the book has succeeded, excited readers
are every authors dream! :-)

Alan Gauld
Author of the "Learn to program" website
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld
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