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Text Processing in Python Review by Dale Wilson
Valuable information poorly presented
There is a lot of good stuff in this book, but the presentation is lousy.
The first chapter dives into functional programming using obscure and terse high order functions including nested lambda expressions. He never does provide a "mere mortal" explanation for how these functions work. I was able to figure it out, but then I've been programming for 35 years in 20+ languages.
As a learning experience it was valuable debugging exercise for me, but as something for a programmer who was just getting to know Python, I can't think of a greater turn off.
Python as a rule is easy to read and easy to write. This book manages to make it unnecessarily hard.
Start with another Python book (or two, or three) then come back to this one when you have a lot of time and patience to spend. As I said there *is* some worthwhile information in there.