I'm ridiculously excited that the book I co-authored with Tim Hall, Python 3 For Absolute Beginners, has been published. Apress very kindly sent me some complimentary copies last week and I immediately took photos of it and posted them on Flickr.
I blogged about how glad I was to be asked to work alongside Tim on the project back in January, and said among other things:
The book's aimed at those learning to program, through the medium of Python 3, rather than those already experienced in Python 2.x. But the new Python looks like an excellent way to teach people about the vagaries of a whole range of programming concepts. Generally the changes in the new version are for the better, and I think Python's benevolent dictatorship were absolutely right to conscience backwards incompatibility in the occasional change.
This is still all true, and I still think that Python 3 is still a quietly exciting overhaul of Python 2.x that raises the bar for both object-oriented and scripting programming languages.
My two chapters are on Exception Handling and Modules. Tim's ten chapters are on... everything else. Buy it. Enjoy it. Request it from your local library. Point it out nonchalantly to your friends. Use it to stop your desk from wobbling. Whatever: I'm just proud it's out there.
