Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming Right now

I am only about a quarter of the way through this volume, and I am fairly certain that this is the worst O'Reilly book I have ever encountered. Most of their beginning programming books I have found quite useful, usually providing exercises that help me to think more like a programmer and get a feel for what sorts of things the code I am learning can do. This book, however, will have you printing endless, monotonous variations of "spam spam eggs and spam" at a prompt. I am quite fine with the occasional reference to where Python got its name, but the author of this book seems to think it an excuse not to bother coming up with any real code or problems that one might try to solve with code. I have even looked ahead to the advanced topics section, and the examples are still relying on printing permutations of spam, eggs, and the number 42 to "demonstrate" functions, methods, and even classes.

There are no exercises in this book at all. There are only the barest hints as to what one might use Python for. Each feature is trotted out, given some variation of "spam" or 42 to work on (if you're lucky, maybe you'll get 42.0: a float!), and then the reader is told to consult the Python documentation and "experiment." That's it. No suggestions as to what direction you might like to go with your experiments. Beginning programmers will find very little that will help them to write useful code here. I know enough about programming to know how some of the constructs being mindlessly presented might be used in the real world, but I will probably not continue using this book to learn Python. I would not recommend it to anyone: there is not enough information about the nuts and bolts of programming for a beginner. As someone who has coded a few actual applications, I simply find the endless stream of spam and eggs so mind-numbing that I cannot come up with my own practice problems. This is a book without an audience; I can't even believe the author enjoyed writing it.Get more detail about Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming.