Programming for Novices and Gurus
Python Essential Reference
By David M. Beazley
New Riders, 1999, 319 pp.
$34.95
Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk
By Brent B. Welch
Prentice-Hall, 2000, 772 pp.
$45
By Eugene E. Kim
The only thing harder than choosing the right programming language for a job is choosing the best book on that language. What makes this decision even harder is that there is rarely a single book that meets everyone's needs.
Consider C. Almost every C veteran (including me) recommends the venerable Kernighan and Ritchie classic, The C Programming Language, to aspiring C programmers—and for good reason. The book is concise and definitive because the language's creator (Ritchie) is a coauthor. However, it's also an extremely poor guide for beginning programmers who want to learn the language.
This problem is amplified for the diverse community of Web developers, many of whom are programming tenderfoots. It's one of the reasons why scripting languages are so popular in the Web world. With scripting languages, developers usually don't have to worry about types, scope, declarations, or compilation—at least not at first.
Python is a clean, object-oriented scripting language that's fairly easy to use, and is becoming more popular for Web applications. However, to take full advantage of Python, you have to understand the language's advanced features and know the broad range of functions available.
