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proper python

#1: Doing things “The Python Way”

Throughout this book, we have very stubbornly resisted writing
code in the most correct Python Way. “That’s not how a Python
programmer would do it,” was a familiar refrain heard from the
Head First Programming technical reviewers. Without fail, and with the
greatest of respect to our reviewers, we generally ignored this advice.
You see, every programming language has its preferred, tried and
true, agreed, and accepted way of doing certain things, collectively
known as programming idioms. And Python is no exception. This is,
of course, a very good thing, because the more programmers
using a particular language who follow the standard way of doing
something, the better. Except, that is, when writing a book like this:
one designed from the get-go to teach programming concepts. Holy smokes! I
can‛t believe they did
There are times when the idiom, although very smart, can be hard it that way...
to understand and even harder to explain. So, when we had a choice
between showing you how to do something in a generic way over
showing you how to do it the Python way, we nearly always chose
the former approach over the latter. This has the effect of making
some of the code in this book positively repulsive to hardened
Python programmers, something that is of little concern to us, as
this book isn’t for them (and they have lots of other books already).
This book is for you: the reader who wants to learn how to program
regardless of the programming language chosen.
Having said all that, if you now want to learn more about The
Python Way, start by scanning through the booklist and book reviews
maintained on the main Python website:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBooks

Yes, that’s supposed
to be an “o”.

Python guru.

Learn lots about Python from
Mark Lutz’s classic, “Learning
th
Python, 4 Edition,” which now
covers Python 3 and previous
386 appendix i releases.