There’s a sample chapter available which covers the topic of documentation. We all know how frustrating it is to write documentation. It’s boring, often it feels pointless and it tends to get out of date. The 7 rules of technical writing presented in the book changed my mind. It’s actually one of my personal favourite chapters in the book.

The first chapter of the book is very friendly and covers installation of many Python flavours, packaging tools such as EasyInstall and setuptools, prompt customization and choices of editors.

While the first chapter is very easy going the second chapters dives deep into syntactic intricacies of Python with it’s iterators, generators, decorators and context providers. If the second chapter won’t make your head spin then the third one on class level Python best practices certainly will. Author of the book does a great job at explaining the pitfalls of multiple inheritance, inconsistent super usage, Python’s method resolution order and finally meta programming which allows to change classes’ and objects’ definitions on the fly.

The rest of the book is a lot less confusing but nonetheless rewarding. Chapter four gives some very good advice on naming standards, building API’s and tools that ease might help along the way. Chapter five explains how to create python packages, distribute and deploy them.

What I really like in every book is examples. One example can explain more than a thousand words could. The examples in the second and third chapters are very valuable and help greatly to understand the concepts explained. The book goes even further and provides a complete example of a small application called Atomisator. This example is implemented following the best practices of previous five chapters.

Chapters eight and nine will be very interesting to team leads which explain distributed version control systems such as Mercurial, continuous integration and managing software in an iterative way.

Another very important topic on Test Driven Development or TDD is presented in chapter eleven. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable test driven development is. Though even today it’s not a widely adopted practice and not a well understood one either. This book will try to convince you why you should be doing TDD and if you’re already convinced it will present you with tools that you can use to do TDD. I was very interested to find out about the available unit testing framework alternatives. Further an interesting idea on doc testing is described which while seems a little exotic may be a very efficient way to keep your documentation up to date.

Reading further there’s a great chapter on optimization which describes general principles of optimization and various profiling techniques. Measuring performance may prove difficult on different hardware such as local development machines and stage servers. I was very intrigued to find out about pystones and the general concept behind it which helps to deal with the problem described.

Together with optimization techniques, various profiler tools which you never knew of, the book describes some generic optimization solutions available. Some are well known such as the Big-O notation, some are less known such as Cyclomatic Complexity. I think this book explains the concepts behind multi threading, multi processing and caching very well. Making an informed decision whether to use threads or multi processes for your Python application may as well mean if it’s going to be successful or not.

And finally the last chapter talks of design patterns. While it’s not the most mind blowing chapter of the book it provides some very interesting details why Python doesn’t have interfaces or how certain GoF patterns can be implemented in a Python specific way.

Conclusion

Should you read this book? My answer is yes. Especially if Python earns your bread and butter. Not only you will know the syntactic intricacies of python it will introduce you to many must know concepts of software development. Even if you’re not a day to day Python developer but you do write an occasional Python script or application by all means read the book and read the first six chapters. I will go even further and recommend this book to non Python developers. Simply because it explains concepts that every developer should understand. And as an extra it is always interesting to learn new ideas and to see how things can be done differently.

All these and other reasons make Python an interesting and valuable language to learn. I’ve chosen to review Expert Python Programming as my next book. Having used Python for personal projects such as PyDumpy or work related tasks such as continuous integration with BuildBot I hope it will be an interesting read that will help me to improve my understanding of Python.

For those interested Packt Publishing offers a sample chapter of the book.