and I find great recipes in this book almost everyday to make my code cleaner and faster.

I like this book for two reasons. 1) If I need to get an idea on how to do something that is not necessarily obvious then it is a good place to look 2) If I have done something and want to see how others may have approached something similar then it is a good gauge on my own 'sanity check' - did I convolute some simple (or complex) logic into a working python script that could be handled in half the space and more elegantly (it has been known to happen) or did I come up with a comparable, better, or unique solution than presented (it has also been known to happen - just not as much as the former). In truth, I often find that I view a solution as 'better' because of the particulars of the application I am working on in which case some subjectivity of usefulness and elegance is based on an inherited aspect of my code and not on the abstract usefulness and elegance which much of the code snippets and explanation presents.

Good idea book, keeping in mind that the authors are trying to encapsulate some wisdom to be applied to a very wide set of problems.

This is the only Python book I've seen to date which provides detailed and practical examples of metaprogramming idioms, and it gets five stars for that chapter way in the back alone. The chapter on sockets programming also made me laugh since Guido seems to be incredibly proud of what I personally consider to be one of the worst sockets libraries I've ever used, but the Twisted guys have already sorted all of that nonsense out for us, so what the hey. Lots of cool stuff in here you probably haven't even thought of trying--like accessing the result of a list comprehension from inside the comprehension itself.

This edition (2) is significantly expanded -- and modified where Python advances warrant it -- from the previous version.

If you want a book that shows best Python programming practices and gets you going for virtually any programming task this is the book for you

I purchased this for my son as he requested it. It was an older version so he would not be able to use it. He ordered the newer one out. It not say what the published date was when I order it.

Hi whoever invented the cook book concept should be really brilliant.I have always had a liking for the cookbook series from o'reilly and this one is a clear winner.It really comes in useful as a quick reference for any small piece of code that u are trying to do to fit in to ur application and finding it difficult for and out of box idea in code.My favorites in python cookbook are the sections on Algorithms and Programs about Programs.A must have for anyone who wishes to explore the charm called python.

I'm new to python but not programming. Like a lot of people I had a need to get up to speed really quickly on Python so I purchased several Python books (Learning Python, Python Essential Reference, and this book). What I've found is that once you learn the basics, I find myself using this book much more than the others. It's a great little "cheat". You start with wanting to accomplish something-or-other and simply look it up in the appendex and there is a real good chance you'll find something similar that will at least get you started. The scope that they cover is really impressive, and the examples are simple and to the point. Just what I need. There is not tons of description for each thing, just enough to get you started. This is truly and invaluable resource.

I expected this book explain the detail sample of python libraries that python library help does not explains.
This book gathers many examples wide domain of program, network, web programming, language basics, xml, design patterns, and so on.

But not include the detail explannation of python's libraries, I think gathering many samples is very easy in this internet world, so, to know many samples from the book like this is only the time consuming.

TO know short samples of library and extend yourself without detail knowledge of libraries, this book is worth reading, otherwise, choise another book.

This is an excellent book for anyone who knows programming, and knows a little bit of python already. It is formatted exactly as a cookbook, many 2-3 page recipes for solving a specific common problem. As such it has many coded examples, all of which demonstrate good programming style and may introduce the reader to some of the more obscure features of the language. It also covers a very wide array of topics, many of which are pure gold. And possibly the best aspect of the book is that it makes a great compliment to resources available on the internet (which are mostly scattered and unorganized).
The drawbacks are that it doesn't cover any topics to a great depth, which is understandable given the nature of the book. Also, it talks about small atomic solutions, but will not help you develop your skills at developing large software systems with python. Lastly, as of this review, python 2.5 has been out for months, and python 3000 is in the works, so look for a new edition or a more contemporary text.

Lots of great ideas in this book. It will help you get your head around Python. A little advanced so I would start with Learning Python or Python for Absolute Beginners.

Used it to improve some of the Python scripts I wrote for work. Unfortunately I bought this volume only *after* submitting my articles to Linux Journal, rather than before (in particular, the ODF article in the May'07 issue would have benefited).

Guido doesn't need this book, but mere Python mortals like me will find it very useful.

Alex (and the rest of those that contributed to this book) does a great job of explaining the 'why' in addition to 'what'. It will help you see thoughtful ways of approaching your problem that you may have not considered and help you avoid common pitfalls. I highly recommend this book.

Even if you know Python well, there is something to learn from this book. And If you're starting, this is an excellent guide for learning good Python coding strategies.

Not only will the 'recipes' in this book tell you how to achieve specific tasks in Python, they will show you how to do it 'Pythonically' - i.e. making idiomatic use of Python's features.

I'm not particularly fond of "cookbooks", but I found this one to be quite useful.

Python is one of the easiest languages to learn, I think, and this cookbook has some good information on accomplishing common tasks. Even if you don't find a recipe to suit your particular need, chances are this book will still provide you with a lot of insight to accomplishing your goal.

this book taught me a lot about stuff I was totally unfamiliar with in python. After reading Learning Python and Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, I thought I knew so much about the language. I was wrong.

the subjects in this book are diverse and remarkably helpful. A solid knowledge of other scripting languages and XML are helpful for most parts. This is not a great book if you have minimal experience in python and nothing else, save it for until you can understand Programming Python.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of cookbooks, I find them full of little patterns and quick solutions, but I don't have any desire to read them cover to cover to improve my design and implementation skills. The book Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is quite different.

After hearing one of the authors, Alex Martelli, talk about object oriented programming at pycon2005 (you can probably find the link on a9) I picked up an electronic copy of his cookbook, through safari, and it has been really helpful to me. I have found it does a very good job of providing both solution with the right level of detail behind so I can improve how I design and code.

So, if you have a slight grasp of python and a problem to solve, this can be quite helpful.

I had the opportunity to skim through this book before I purchased it and found that it had several very practical, usable and understandable examples ("recipes"). It is a simple book that you can use as a reference and to learn how the "pros" create simple and elegant python code.

String handling, money, time, dates. Email, network sockets, cgi, xml. The staples of the cookbook, and Python Cookbook certainly has these. However, interspersed throughout are chapters that seem to have come from at least one other completely different book, a more discursive rumination on Python programming in general. Each chapter begins with a mini essay from a Python luminary, and the discussion of each recipe is fairly extensive.

If you do any scientific or engineering work, you'll know that Python is everywhere on the scientific desktop, providing bindings, scripting and GUI front ends for ancient Fortran/C monstrosities. Reflecting this interest, there is a strong emphasis on performance, with chapters devoted to algorithms and searching and sorting.

Elsewhere, those who have graduated from the plethora of beginner's books, but have been bemused by the complete lack of any intermediate texts, will be pleased to find chapters on Python shortcuts (getting the most out of sequences for the most part) and one on generators and iterators. Futher, there is a chapter on OOP the Python way (including examples of dynamic delegation and design patterns implementation), and one on metaclasses.

This is an extremely useful book, particularly the chapters on using Python's basic collections, which will furnish the reader with some essential idioms for efficient use. However, this, and the OOP chapters would have been better as a separate book. But in lieu of a Thinking in Python or Effective Python, you need this book if you want to do any serious development in Python.

As a cookbook, it has everything you will be expecting as a springboard for exploring the standard library, except for regular expressions. But these are so well covered in introductory books, that you won't need enormous coverage here. On the other hand, the material is presented in a fairly wordy manner, which makes for interesting reading, but for dipping in and out, makes finding things more difficult than it might be.

The other notable thing about Python Cookbook is that it has rather a large number of errors in it. You will want to check the O'Reilly website for the errata, especially if you don't have the most recent printing, rather than scratching your head over why the Singleton implementation doesn't work at all.

Nonetheless, this is a vital resource for Python 2.4 users; even if you don't think you need a traditional cookbook, there is an enormous amount of material here you can benefit from.

This book gives the reader a tour of the possibilities of the Python language. Both the Python novice and expert will find the book relevant since newcomers will be exposed to a wide array of things that Python can do, while experts can learn different ways of tackling a problem by looking at somebody else's approach. The book is well written and provides historical insights into Python's evolution. This second edition has a lot more examples in it compared to the first edition. The authors have done a superb job in explaining concepts as opposed to simply presenting listing after listing of Python code. Hence, it makes for a good reference book for the person wanting to dive into Python. The book assumes some knowledge of the Python language, so use it to complement a book that will teach the basics of the language (such as "Learning Python").

In summary, I would highly recommend the book for the person wanting to know the Python language.

I really appreciate the depth and quality of the work in this book. The concept of having the Python community build a book is keeping right in line with the philosophy of the original development of Python. Thanks you Alex.

Full disclosure: I purchased the first edition of this book, and received the second edition as a reviewers copy. I work for Zope Corporation.

The O'Reilly Python Cookbook is a fun resource for Python programmers at most levels. The fun comes in part from the personalities that shine through the introductions and the community-authored recipes gathered from the ActiveState Python Cookbook website. The other fun comes from the smorgasbord of topics and technologies laid out for the reader, encouraging browsing and experimentation. New Python programmers will find recipes that highlight some of the newer features of the Python language, and experienced Python programmers will likely find thought-provoking recipes both peripherally and directly related to their specialties and interests.

Like the first edition, this second edition covers a wide range of topics. Each topic has a usually-interesting introduction by well-known names in the Python community. Some topics are of general interest-shortcuts and algorithms, for instance-while others explore somewhat more specialized topics, such as networks, XML, and databases. Each cookbook recipe I read was impressively short, while often still having enough weight to them to address non-toy usages of the approaches. Many examples can also be used as introductions to the modules and packages they use. Another important similarity to the first edition is that a portion of the proceeds from the book sales are donated to the Python Software Foundation.

This edition of the cookbook does have some significant changes from the previous one. While the first edition addressed Python versions in the 1.x and 2.x line, this one addresses only Python 2.3 and 2.4. It adds about a third more recipes than the first edition, and tops the first edition's page count by over 200 pages. Some of the new additions address relatively new packages, such as the datetime, dateutils, pytz, and decimal packages, while others focus on older packages that are waxing in their influence and popularity, such as Twisted. Many recipes are more polished, such as the "Synchronizing All Methods in an Object," which has an arguably more general purpose approach and an interesting discussion in the new edition.

Omissions are sometimes as interesting as inclusions in recipe books, but an interpretation of their significance can be difficult. The new edition dropped almost 100 of the first edition's recipes. In the "Distributed Programming" topic, the SOAP references in the first edition have disappeared, and a recipe for Twisted's Perspective Broker has surfaced. While the Perspective Broker is an interesting technology with an elegant cookbook example, the seeming judgement-SOAP is now less worth discussion than one of the Twisted project's packages-might raise some eyebrows. Similarly, Zope and the ZODB (Zope Object Database) are acknowledged as heavyweights in the introductions to their respective topics ("Web Programming" and "Persistence and Databases"). Zope 3 is even granted a rave review: "The new, revolutionary major release, Zope 3, makes Zope more Pythonic and powerful than ever." But not a single recipe can be found for either, in either edition. Perhaps that simply is indicative that the Zope community ought to pay more attention to the Cookbook website.

This returns us to the initial observation of this review: the cookbook is a community driven project, and thus reflects the personalities of the programmers who contributed to it, rather than necessarily to trends of the Python or IT community. But it also benefits from the energy and enthusiasm of the contributors who often have palpable excitement for the technologies they are demonstrating. This also makes me more interested in the book as a source for introductions than as a source for ready-made recipes.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a working, explained example of a new package ought to be worth quite a few too. The cookbook is a fun browse and a fun introduction to other aspects of the Python language. While I have found myself using one or two of the recipes from the first edition, that use alone is not enough to justify the cover price. It is more compelling to me as a fun introduction to Python topics and approaches. In that light, I recommend it.

It covers a lot of important issues that will be useful for me in future and now.

Good:

As other reviewers have pointed out, this book offers solutions for a broad range of programming problems. There is something for every level from beginner to expert (the most advanced examples were well over my head). The recipes are enhanced by discussions that are mostly very well and clearly written, giving insight into the design and logic of the presented recipes. They thus guide the way to adapting the recipes to your own programs.
So, most of the content of this book is good. 4-5 stars for that.

Bad / Production:

The recipes (so I gather) are mostly edited versions of what is available at ActiveState's online cookbook. However, the edited versions seem not to be available online (at least there is no pointer, and O'Reilly's website does not provide one either). Nor does the book include a CD. For all the hype in the book about this being a book by the Python community for the Python community, this is disappointing. Not even pointers are provided to on-line cookbook recipes that were used as starting points for those printed in this book. This is just bad craftsmanship on the part of O'Reilly. (On a similar note, the back cover promises a foreword by Guido but there isn't one.)

Bad / Content:

Sugar is sweet but bad for your health. So it is with this book - too many recipes add only (syntactic) sugar but no minerals and vitamins. Several 'shortcuts' are just wasted ink and breath - they will save you 1-2 lines of code when writing a function but then you have to import the shortcut implementation and get to make the extra function calls... Where these 'shortcuts' help to avoid some Python gotchas, it would have been more useful to just document the gotcha in question and show how to avoid it in straight Python code without any sugaring. Case in point: The once-only initialization of function default arguments. If you write:

def foo(bar=[])
bar.append(quux)

then previous quuxes will be lurking in the bars of every subsequent foo call that does not pass bar itself. So, you must write:

def foo(bar=None):
if not bar: bar=[]

to get an empty [] for every call. Now does this 'problem' merit a more elaborate, sugary 'solution'? I don't think so.

Some recipes are recipes for disaster. We are told how to automatically call the __init__ routines of every superclass... what we are not told is how to automatically call them in the appropriate order or with the respective arguments for making things work. How often do you write an __init__ that takes only the 'self' argument? Sure, it occurs, but... The omission of implicit superclass calls was a conscious design choice in Python and a wise one at that. Too many recipes like this one just want to show you how to subvert Python's conscious design choices. The sweet taste won't last but give way to heartburn.

For a book of this scope and design it is of course impossible to avoid criticism of the kind 'why did you include A but not B...'
Still, here goes:

XML: There are excellent libraries such as ElementTree and now cElementTree that offer fast, clean and 'Pythonic' alternatives to the standard library modules for XML parsing. More than just a URL pointer should have been provided.

Web programming: Only Jython and Twisted are mentioned as alternatives to CGI. Now Twisted may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but ordinary mortals will never know, because it has about the the most confusing and unfathomable documentation of anything on the web (ooh I forgot Zope...). Presenting Twisted 'recipes' (or rather, plugs) with 'discussions' that drone about its power but are again just the same handwaving stuff as in the on-line docs is useless.

(If you just want to get your web stuff done with minimal pain: For simple PHP-like embedded scripting but with the advantages of Python, look at Spyce, and for an easy application server, look at Cherrypy or Webware).

So, altogether, a good book but not quite on par with e.g. Python in a Nutshell.

This is the book that you'll keep coming back to over and over again. It's got helpful recipes for everything you need to do; date manipulation, file i/o, database access, user interface, XML, network programming and more. And it's got material on generators in the latest Python release. This is an essential reference for any Python programmer.

There is a wealth of information in this book for anyone interested in learning or developing with Python.
Take it from someone who has literally spent hundreds of dollars on computer books - If there were ever a computer book that is worth every cent, this is it.
Even if you are using wxPython don't make the mistake of thinking you will not have to program in Python to make the pretty interface work.
Get a good editor and get this book.
You can thank me in the morning.

This is one of those books that you need to quickly review every month or so. It's 388 recipies (I'd guess you'd call them, after all this is a cookbook) that comes from the big, worldwide Python community (which can be found at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python).

Since these recipies are on-line, why would you want to pay money for another book?

Because the authors have taken best, most tested, most useful of the recipies and put them together in one book.

Because the book is better organized in terms of an index, a table of contents, and a few pages on each of the major categories that urther define what's in that category. All this is so you can more quickly find what you are looking for.

Because on-line is great, but you don't exactly know what you're getting. The descriptions on like are very, very short, immediately followed by code. In the book they tell you what problem the programmer is trying to solve, gives the solution, then has a discussion that talks about what that solution really does. And because these writers know what they are talking about.

Why would you want to read it every month or so? Because like a food cookbook, people don't really follow recipies, they use recipies as a guide to something that sounds good and then they modify it to suit their own tastes. You probably won't use the cookbook code exactly as it very often, you'll use it as a starting point. And just a quick scan of the recipies here may (it does me) give you a starting place for that piece of code you're about to start writing.

Python Cookbook Review

Excellent book. The examples are well-written, and are real-world - they present solutions suitable for field use. Of course, like all cookbooks, you may not find the answer in the book. Still, the diversity of solutions is surprising, and, even if it does not cover your particular problem, the book will teach you much about problem solving. The book is especially good at showing the "Python Way" - that is, how to solve problems from a Python perspective, as opposed to how you might solve the problem in Perl or C++.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Python.

There are many reasons to pick up this book. For me, the reason was: I wanted to learn about Python with a quick, hands-on approach. In other words, show me some code I can punch out quickly; I was looking for some kind of instant gratification. =)

I jumped directly to the Index and looked up Mac OS X (my OS of choice). There I found a few starters. For example, Counting Pages of PDF Documents on Mac OS X. While on the surface not very compelling or all that useful, it does show some native Python integration with the OS X CoreGraphics package - which I wasn't aware of. After running that program (it took me an entire 30 seconds to write and execute) I bounced around the book looking for random cool things to try out.

All the things you would expect to see in the cookbook are there; manipulating files, parsing time and dates, network programming, processing XML, etc, etc, etc. One sections I appreciated was on debugging and testing, however I wish it was larger. It was only 20 pages of the 800 total pages.

I was already comfortable with Perl (Python will look somewhat familiar to Perl programmers) and just had never taken the time to sit down and explore Python. This book was a quick and easy way to get my hands into Python and start learning a new language.

Maybe the most distinctive aspect of this book is how it was compiled. From over 300 authors in the Python developers community, who freely contributed their suggestions. So much so that the editors had a difficult time culling down into what they consider to be a minimal [!] set of 338 recipes. A big expansion and update over the first edition, which dealt with earlier versions of Python.

O'Reilly has been experimenting with innovations in technical publishing, and this book is an impressive example. It is a natural manifestation of the open source movement and the power of the Internet to bring such a community together. So while superficially from the book's cover, it looks like many other O'Reilly books, it may be a harbinger of future efforts. And not just in Python.