[TriLUG] OOP book recommendations

[Mike Mueller]

Posted to dev as well.  Those folks are very helpful with thise kind of 
question.

On Tuesday 23 July 2002 17:20, John F Davis reputedly wrote:
<snip>
> Since then, I started Design Patterns but never got past the first couple
> of chapters.

Bit of an esoteric read isn't it?  One rarely gets a chance to apply its 
principles since they seem to apply to the large system architecture level,  
and I rarely work at that level.   

<snip>

When I faced the decision of learning Perl vs Python, I choose Python.  Two 
factors swayed me: 1) testimonials that Python is easier to read than Perl, 
and 2) Python's being OO from the ground up gets you exposed to that way of 
thinking as you solve problems.  I realized that Perl is the "duct tape" of 
the Internet but I was put off by the size of the Perl language and its 
"write once-read never" reputation.  I did not have any legacy Perl scripts 
to maintain either. www.python.org has more info on "why Python?"

I find the string, list, tuple, and dictionary containers in Python to be 
powerful tools.   These are concepts I found in the C++ Standard Template 
Library.  I was using the Python versions of these constructs within minutes. 
The STL versions took hours of research before I was able to use them.  (To 
be fair, part of the problem with STL was the book I bought.  It was part of 
the Addison-Wesley Technical Obfuscation Series of books.)

I bought the O'Reilly Python book and printed off Python Library Reference 
(worth the effort, ink and paper - I think you can by it from O'Reilly also). 
-- 
m