Looks like David Mertz's Text Processing in Python is out. I can't see myself holding out too long on that purchase.
Try before you buy - read Text Processing with Python online.
Just one criticism - why-oh-why another one-chapter Python tutorial at the beginning? I really can't see the point. Virtually every Python book has one of these. You don't get this with, say, Java books. They assume that you know Java already.
Also interesting from the pen of David - Why list comprehensions are called list comprehensions.
Posted to Python by Simon Brunning at July 01, 2003 03:32 PMThe TOC does not look that interseting. Most stuff you can figure out easily useing for example the Python Cookbook.
Posted by: Harmen on July 3, 2003 10:56 AMI disagree. Yes, standard string handling and REs are well covered elsewhere, but parsers, state machines and unicode *aren't*, AFAIK.
Posted by: Simon on July 3, 2003 11:41 AMI'm glad to see my book recommended, of course. I can't really argue with Harmen that the stuff I cover is interesting--but what I do *is* quite a bit different than what _Python Cookbook_ does, even where it covers nominally similar topics.
I do want to propose one correction of Simon's announcement. I'm not sure where he got the idea that I put a Python tutorial at the beginning. That's not the case. However, perhaps the ordering is not a crucial point--I *do* have a sort of tutorial in Appendix A. But I think readers will find that the way I introduce Python is strikingly different from what they'll find in any other tutorial. Maybe it's not necessary to include even so, but it's pretty short, at near the end of the book (it's not the last appendix, but it is outside the main body).
Posted by: David Mertz on July 5, 2003 07:09 PMI agree with David here; both the content of Chapter 1 and the appendix's introduction are good and relevant. Especially the content of Chapter 1, which I think Simon was referring to, is most certainly not your typical Python introduction. It does have, in my opinion, an unfortunately ambigous name: "Python basics", which gives _me_ the impression that it is a basic Python tutorial. But then again, I can't come up with a better name right now, so my criticism might not be valid. ;-)
Anyhow, I am reading the text provided in the website and I am thinking of doing a proper review (insofar as I can), and I am probably going to buy the whole book (I don't think it will be in Finnish bookstores any time soon, though).
Sorry for the misinformation - my bad. I saw a 'Python basics' chapter at the beginning, and assumed that it was *yet* *another* Python tutorial. Since I've been irritated by this tendency in the past, I flipped into rant mode.
I was recommending your book on the basis of the two chapters I *have* looked at - the RE chapter, and the parser chapter. Both of these are excellent.
Posted by: Simon on July 7, 2003 08:59 AMSlashdot review here:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/06/2253222&mode=nested&threshold=5
Posted by: Simon on July 8, 2003 01:04 PM