Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming
by: Luciano Ramalho (0)
Don't waste time bending Python to fit patterns you've learned in other languages. Python's simplicity lets you become productive quickly, but often this means you aren't using everything the language has to offer. With the updated edition of this hands-on guide, you'll learn how to write effective, modern Python 3 code by leveraging its best ideas.
Discover and apply idiomatic Python 3 features beyond your past experience. Author Luciano Ramalho guides you through Python's core language features and libraries and teaches you how to make your code shorter, faster, and more readable.
Complete with major updates throughout, this new edition features five parts that work as five short books within the book:
- Data structures: Sequences, dicts, sets, Unicode, and data classes
- Functions as objects: First-class functions, related design patterns, and type hints in function declarations
- Object-oriented idioms: Composition, inheritance, mixins, interfaces, operator overloading, protocols, and more static types
- Control flow: Context managers, generators, coroutines, async/await, and thread/process pools
- Metaprogramming: Properties, attribute descriptors, class decorators, and new class metaprogramming hooks that replace or simplify metaclasses
The Reviews
Fluent Python was the best resource for learning or improving your knowledge of Python. First, it collected all the important topics into one book, so you didn't have to scan through thousands of low quality medium posts. Second, the topics are grouped into nice, lesson-sized chapters, so that you can get a nice, deep view of particular areas like asyncio or collections.I'm glad to say that the 2nd edition is just as good as the first. Not only that, but it's also updated to cover Python 3.10 and has many updated chapters, for example, about dataclasses and typing.
This is IMO the best advanced book on Python. I read the first edition five years ago or so - 900 pages - and am now working the through the second edition - 1500 pages. This book is not for the casual Python programmer, however. I have been writing Python code for more than twenty years, but I learn new things or sharpen my knowledge with every chapter. The coverage is comprehensive; the writing is very clear, and the example code is carefully annotated.I had been eagerly awaiting this new edition, which is a year or two late from the original publication date, but I am very disappointed with the Kindle version, which was fine in the first edition. While the Kindle app on my pc works fine, it does not work on my iPad, which has plenty of free memory. After just ten pages or so, the app freezes, and I cannot get any further. I cannot even jump to later points in the book.The publisher, O'Reilly, refuses to take any responsibility for this. Amazon, when contacted, promised to investigate and get back to me, but, in fact, I got no further response other than an offer of a refund, which I don't want.I am now reading the book on my iPad via a browser, but this has a lot of drawbacks.
First of all, as to the content of the book: This is THE best book on Python in my opinion. It's the way to understand how Python works so that you can dance with it, not just sit on the sidelines wondering why things are the way they are. Get it, read it, and you WILL know Python at a much more substantive level than most Python programmers who have not read this.Many people (including the author) may warn you that this is an "advanced book" or that it focuses on the obscure topic of metaprogramming with __dunder__() methods in Python, but it turns out that the way it explains Python using these things ends up teaching you just exactly what you need to know to use the language effectively. It's (probably) not a book for a beginning programmer who needs humor and cartoons to keep them awake, but for anyone with a technical orientation who wants to just be told how things work, this is the best book you could ask for. It does not tell you anything you do not need to know.My advice for intelligent, motivated, technical people (like you I suspect) who want to learn Python is to first go through the official Python Tutorial (on the official Python website) if you need an introduction to the features of the language and then read this book from cover to cover.It's just a great book.Now a note on the production of this edition by O'Rielly: I was disappointed that they didn't do a nicer job with the production and printing of the 2nd edition. It's printed in monochrome on heavy paper which makes the physical book a serious tome at around 1,000 pages. For the price they're asking I was hoping to see something like the quality of their "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems 2nd Edition" which is printed on thinner, higher-quality paper, in full color, and the paper flows and feels great in your hand and even though it's a big book it's really nice to own in that form. For Fluent Python, I recommend reading it in one of the electronic formats like Kindle or O'Reilly Learning, or I believe there's a source for an official purchasable PDF version that the author Tweeted about a while back. I have not seen the Kindle version myself, but I was very happy with the O'Reilly Learning online version and I presume the Kindle experience should be similar.In any case, it gets all the stars, and you should own a copy in some medium.
this is not about the content of the book, is about the packaging, the book came unsealed so I'm not sure if it is new, and the cover came damaged ...
The book is not for new python learner, but it's a great book to learn python inside knowledge
this is not about the content of the book, is about the packaging, the book came unsealed so I'm not sure if it is new, and the cover came damaged ...
This book is dense with great info, but is not boring to read. I like to pick it up, flip to a random page, and learn something new about things I thought I already knew pretty well.
This is so far the best python book I ever read. Covered a lot of concepts in details with good examples and excellent explanations. I have to say this is probably not a book for beginners, for whom the python official tutorial is probably the best place to get start.
Exactly what my son was looking for!
Just buy it. Learned a lot from this book!
