Pro Python (Pro Series)

Description

Pro Python, by Marty Allchin, is another book that tries to bring beginner and intermediate Python programmers up to the next level. This book is targeted towards people with a bit of familiarity with OOP in Python and basic control structures, but beyond that no more knowledge is really necessary. Allchin goes on to introduce a wide range of topics to the reader such as decorators, list comprehensions, generators, and annotations. This is only a brief look at what is covered in the first chunk of the book. Allchin also focuses some chapters on software distribution, testing, and documentation, and ends the book with a chapter focused on designing your own framework for parsing CSV files. He also focuses chapters on working with Strings and object management, as well as a basic chapter on functions and classes that will introduce more advanced concepts in these two areas.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is the first chapter "Principles and Philosophy" which focuses on the Pythonic way of writing code and managing a project. He covers about 20-25 concepts that will make you a better Python programmer. In addition, throughout the book Allchin always makes sure to mention when he is teaching something that has a syntactic difference between Python2 and Python3.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with previous Python experience that want's to step up to the next level. I also believe that this would be a great book for a person with programming experience in another language who wants to rapidly pick up Python. You might need to read a few resources online while working through the book, but overall, Allchin does such a great job of explaining the concepts he covers that it makes this book a great resource for any developer.