Book Review – The Python Workbook

This weekend I have managed to finish the online version of the book “The Python Workbook”, kindly provided to me by Springer.

The book provides you with 174 exercises, which can make you an advanced beginner (if this term exists) in Python. The excersises are well-structured indeed, taking into account anything from the basics of the language (printing, units, conditionals, loops and functions) to some more advanced structures as dictionaries, lists and working with files. The “more advanced” structures are present twice, thus you have two levels of excersices for them. The excersises are well selected indeed. I liked themand I enjoyed solving (or looking at their solutions) them.

Let’s state the things I did not like:

1. No code provided in electronic form. The code is written explicitly in the book.  (I will not comment on this one, but I consider it a major minus in the 2015);
2. In the online version, the quality was somehow rather low, in some of the code I should have looked twice to see whether it is an underscore or a full stop;
3. The author should have spent a few pages for instructions how to install a Python IDE. (but this is a small minus, after all this is a Workbook).

Now, let’s state the things I liked:

1. Really good selection of tasks;
2. The solution is explained well, with a lot of comments;
3. A man can learn a lot from it, if he/she has another book for Python or follows a course, explaining how the language works.

That’s all folks!