The Python Workbook: A Brief Introduction with Exercises and Solutions (Texts in Computer Science)

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Good for what it is, but not enough for science or many other uses
    Conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t criticize a book for subjects it omits. That’s a pretty silly argument in many contexts (e.g., a history of Russia without the USSR, a history of the UK without the monarchy, etc.), but in this case, I’ll depart from such “wisdom” because the omission may be important to many prospective buyers.This seems like a fine book for people who just want to learn Python syntax. It has close to 200 exercises, many of them with full solutions. Each topic also has a few pages of exposition, an advance over the 1st edition.A significant omission, though, is anything to do with numpy or matplotlib.pyplot libraries. The only library to get a mention is the ancient Library of Alexandria.) Exponents and square roots using the math module of the standard library are about as sophisticated as the math gets in this book. If you want to use Python for science or engineering, or for computer science applications like neural networks, just be aware that this book won’t be adequate to teach you the basic tools you need.In effect, this book does a good job at teaching you how to row a speedboat, but nothing more. It’s a shame, because a really concise Python 3 guide with dozens of solved exercises in scientific programming would be really useful. Concise guides exist, like Kinder & Nelson’s “A Student’s Guide to Python for Physical Modeling” (2nd ed. Princeton 2021), but that book’s exercises are fewer, and only a few of the simplest ones have solutions. Maybe there could be a companion volume to this one, dedicated to applications — or better, an all-in-one in the 3rd edition of this title?

  2. Damage used and covered in white powder.
    Book was obviously used paid the full price for a new one, pages were written in and creased and folded. White powder has been pouring from the pages, I just hope it’s not some kind of drug cause it’s on everything it’s touched and in my car.

  3. This is a great book for learning to write python programs, doing the exercises is the key to learning to code, other books just give information about the structure and specific topics but dont have any exercises for you to practice the different topics. This book is a great addition to other python learning books.

  4. This book is absolutely amazing! I’m a maths graduate and have dabbled in coding before, namely C++ and MATLAB so I already had some knowledge of core programming concepts.But I wanted to learn Python for career prospects, and in a structured way with exercises to solve – this book is just that. It is split into different sections such as ‘Decisions’, where concepts are introduced in enough detail for you to get on with the exercises at the end of the section. It’s in enough detail for the book to be self complete, not too detailed that you get lazy and don’t google some small things to perform the exercises.The exercises build up your knowledge slowly, with easy ones first and then they slowly get harder to challenge you – and they also show you the applications that coding has in many different disciplines. With maths, learning concepts and doing exercises / solving problems is the best way to learn, and I’ve found the same way to be true for programming. 10/10 would recommend – perfect for an undergrad student.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *