PyATL Bytecode: Review of Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python

Review of “Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python”

 

By Ian Mizer

 

 

This is the kind of book every python developer can use and every developer should buy. This book tries to teach the readers the fundamentals of python and writing code in general. Almost all of this book will be useful during the entire run of python 3 and some of this book will still be worth it's pages for the python 4 future. This book covers several incredibly important topics like organizing a git, understanding code smells, how to ask good questions on stack overflow, and common python gotchas . The author also goes to great length to teach the reader about a lot of what's going on under the hood when you call certain things in python like looping with python and how it's calling iter and next to actually execute the loop. While each chapter is useful it also keeps itself brief, usually not going farther than 20 pages per chapter. All in all I cannot recommend “Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python” enough for every person who wants to learn fundamentals surrounding coding and specifically coding in python.

 

Readability: How easy would it be for someone to sit down with this book and finish it quickly

Accuracy : How accurate is the information being given? Could you write every single line of code in this book and have the books answers match the code you wrote. Normally this is a -1 out of 10 per major mistake and per 4 minor mistakes the book makes

 

Subject : Does this book do what it wants to do and is what it wants to do good?

 

Bonus points: for extra stuff that I liked. This will be the most subjective part of the review and might not go into much detail. It's just little things that I highly enjoyed and wanted to give a shoutout about

 

Readability 10/10:

 

I finished this book in 9 days reading 20-60 pages a day. The book is very quickly digestible as most of it doesn't require you to sit down and write code. In fact half of the chapters require you to do nothing at all and instead understand the fundamentals of python. Because of this a person can get through the book incredibly quickly, only stopping or slowing down during the sessions were they check the libraries given or try setting up some of the libraries and git actions that the book teaches you.

 

Accuracy 10/10:

 

There were no errors that I could find that actually affected the reader. Just a minor one at the start of the book. The publisher will probably have fixed it by the time you see this review.

 

Subject 10/10:

 

Because it is very difficult for the words in this book to lose value I can say that the subjects covered here are the most important subjects that any reader would want to know. What this book wants to teach is very durable to time and as I said at the start of this review, all of this book is useful across the entire python 3 ecosystem and will mostly be useful across any future python 4 ecosystems. Especially since it covers git and stack overflow topics. I would say that the only things that won't stand the test of time is when it informs the reader of certain libraries like timeit, cprofiler, and black. Most of those libraries are considered essential to understanding or formatting your code so even then it's going to be difficult to say that any of them will fall out of style anytime soon. Since this is a fundamentals book on par with testing basics or understanding OOP I can't recommend this book enough to every python user.

 

 

Bonus Points:

 

+1 for brevity:

This book covers a lot of subjects and I think the author does amazingly well at making sure there is no wasted space. The author covers the basic that he needs to and doesn't try to get you to do an example at the end of every chapter and I think that makes it more easily digestible to people who will already know certain chapters. All in all a great read

 

+1 for doing a good job at being timeless:

 

As I said earlier in this review, this book will last a really long time. It might still be good after 10 years and not many books in this field could ever say that. This is because it's covering a lot of what needs to go on behind the scenes and under the hood in the python language. Teaching what double underscores are doing or what some of the python gotchas are lasts a really long time. It will definitely last through the entire life cycle of python 3. So kudos

 

 

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