| Zed Shaw disagrees: http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html , and I think he has a point. "The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples [...]" Dive into Python has code examples which use ODBC: "He has a [...] book that purports to teach people programming that still, in 2010, references a piece of crap technology from the 90's. Yes, he actually used that technology to teach Python in the beginning of his book six years ago. [...] Meanwhile, Mr. Pilgrim's book hasn't been updated in 6 years even though it's [...] online and people can send him patches. [...] Dive Into Python isn't just bad because of the use of ODBC, it's also just full of bad initial examples. Take a look at your first Python program and boggle at all the bizarre stuff a beginner has to suddenly comprehend: - A function, with a giant doc comment right away. - Weird underscore variables with a bad font making it look like one underscore. - A list comprehension for-loop to join a string using a format string off a tuple. - A dict, formatted with backslash chars that aren't even needed. Holy crap, how in the hell is that a good first example? Even worse is it starts a trend within the book of using ODBC as a theme to teach Python." Edit: Snipped strong language. |