Maybe it's not just about the money? It isn't for me, either. But when the HTML version is 100% free, people have little grounds to complain about the price of an e-book. (Indeed, I've never received a single complaint about the price of any Rails Tutorial product.)
We'll see how it turns out. I'll be writing about it shortly. Interestingly enough, people seem to be willing to pay $2.99 for an ePub version. I may try doing two prices if that's the case.
https://gitorious.org/learn-python-the-hard-way/learn-python...
Zed, I think many people would really appreciate a changelog of some sorts between the two versions.
edit: also see this comment by Zed which basically goes over what's changed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2700557
...Oops, I thought this was Learn Ruby the Easy Way with an introduction by DHH and Ryan Bigg. Sorry.
Would anyone like to recommend something similar for people already well versed in (a) mainstream language(s)?
then do:
http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/
But, I'll also say, LPTHW is deceptively simple. Try doing it anyway, since if you know a language already you can blaze through it, and when you get to around 30 or so it sneaks up behind you.
But anyway, great job.
It's a good, well-informed, easy read.
LPTHW is structured well for beginners, but it just so happens it's structured well for pros too. The exercises are a great way to discover portions of Python that aren't intuitive to you. You'll hit roadblocks where your code won't run. That's when you'll really learn.
Think Python is fantastic, it was our "textbook" in a python course.
As with most things, you get out of it what you put into it. For example, I wrote unit tests in one of the 'extra credit' assignments to explain a bunch of python's symbols.
The idea of LPTHW has always seemed cool, but I've looked at the table of contents a couple of times and thought "huh, 80% of these topics seem trivial to me"; maybe I could still benefit by skimming through and reading anything that I don't already know. Also, it's kind of a bummer that there's no .mobi version.
Plus, you can't understand the solution until you encounter the problem. Reading the language manual every so often after you've encountered more problems is often enlightening. I've been working through the bash man page this way for years. (It's taking me a while because I don't really do much shell scripting, so I don't encounter very many problems that I need solutions to.)
As for .mobi version, it's a pain in the ass to generate it well enough for a "code book". It's supposed to be coming out on the Kindle store soon, but all of my previews of it just look like junk. I got it as close as I could, but .mobi just doesn't cut it when there's strictly formatted code. If you've got a suggestion on making code look nice in .mobi I'd love to hear it.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00586LJ2O/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
The course includes video lectures and a Q&A feature. I have not taken the course, but I really liked the first edition book.
Python 3 Wall of Shame: http://python3wos.appspot.com/
On a side note: WTF is up with these companies? This stuff isn't hard, but the whole time I'm trying to do this it's been nothing but friction. So annoying.
Might buy the paperback in time just so I can have it on my bookshelf.
