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Deitel and Deitel Book...

James T. Dennis jadestar at idiom.com
Thu Mar 14 20:50:55 EST 2002 
Dean Goodmanson <ponderor at lycos.com> wrote:

>> I wonder how much interest there would be in a revival?

>> Dinu

> YES!  
> I've found Python to be an excellent learning environment for personal
> development in software engineering and computer science.

> Especially since the advent of 
> href="http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIPython"
> Bruce Eckel's _Thinking in Python_ 

> and 
> http://vig.pearsoned.com/store/product/0,,store-562_banner-0_isbn-0130409561,00.html"
> Thomas Christopher's _Python Programming Patterns_ 

> Best Regards, 
> Dean

 Christopher's book has almost nothing to do with "Patterns."  While the 
 "patterns" community is somewhat vague about the definition of "design patterns"
 Christopher employs a definition that's so nebulous as to be completely 
 meaningless?  It's sort of like saying "Chair: anything that could be sat upon,
 and the act of sitting, standing, or being, or anyone that sits, stands or 
 is"  (as in the chair of the meeting sat on the lawn, which was her chair).

 It's sort of like that, except that Mr. Christopher isn't nearly so clear
 or definitive on the topic of patterns.

 In a twenty chapter book he devotes one specifically to patterns.  He lists
 twenty patterns that roughly correspond to most of the GoF patterns; but he
 doesn't ennumerate them so the reader who is familiar with the seminal GoF
 volume is left to wonder which three GoF design patterns were silently omitted,
 or to wonder if some were merged in some way.  Mr. Christopher doesn't describe
 alternatives or controversies in the patterns (such as Martelli's "Borg" vs. the
 GoF "Singleton")

 However, the worst failing of this book is that it doesn't include cogent code 
 examples.  It seems to be floor clippings from scripts or small programs that
 he's used in his projects.  The points under discussion in the running text are
 not isolated or highlighted in the code listings and the examples have little 
 pedegogical value.  

 One of his examples implements a priority queue by treating a list as a "heap" 
 (his term); his example takes over 50 lines of code and he doesn't clearly show 
 sample usage of this class.  After awhile I abandonned my pondering of his code 
 and wrote my own from scratch (as a dictionary of queues with a list of the 
 keys to sort into priority order).  I won't argue that mine code was better
 than his (since I didn't understand his code and I didn't have a clear API to
 emulate).  However my code only took about 25 lines to implement, allowed me
 to have arbitrary priority designations (integers, reals, letters, anything
 sequence that was comparable and "sortable") and should have been pretty 
 fast and lightweight (though I didn't rigorously profile it).  The API I 
 offered for mine was a superset of what I saw in his, adding items to a queue
 automatically created new queues as necessary (or could optionally raise an 
 exception if one set an instance flag); empty queues are automatically removed
 from the dictionary and keylists; call ".next()" (with no specific priority)
 gets the first item in the "highest priority" queue); "highest priority" could
 be set at instantiation --- increasing or reverse sort/lexical order; etc.

 (The point is that his code example was confusing and long; and it would seem
 to be unnecessarily so if a mere student such as myself can produce something
 shorter, simpler and with roughly similar functionality.  If his example 
 offered some functional advantage that I could not discern, it suggests that
 it was not a good example or that it lacked supporting exposition in the 
 accompanying text).

 In short I disliked this book.  None of the code examples even approached the
 claim of "enterprise ready" that was proudly touted on the cover.  These were
 examples of "programming in the small" rather than "in the large."

 (It did have one saving grace: the chapter or so on threading was clear and 
 concise.  I can't assure you that it was either comprehensive or entirely 
 correct --- but it was a very good introduction to concurrency problems and to
 Python's elegant and simple threading support).
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