It has been a long time coming, but finally this book has been updated. With the 4th edition comes a big change. This edition has been updated to ONLY cover Python 3.x. This is a great book and will make a great addition if you want to learn more about developing applications with Python.

You should note however,  that this book is not a Python reference guide. It is written primarily as an advanced tutorial that is a follow-up to the Learning Python book. Therefore it does not cover any aspects of core Python. For that you would be better of looking at Learning Python.

This book is over 1600 pages long. This makes it particularly heavy. I do not recommend that this book be kept anywhere that it can fall from. It will hurt if you happen to get in its way.

There are a couple of omissions that surprised me. In the chapter on GUI programming. I expected there would be more on using either PyGTK or PyQt. They are mentioned, but that is it. tkInter is covered instead. Personally I have not seen TK used for quite some time.  Most of the applications that I have seen use PyGTK (mostly because I use Ubuntu). Another omission is that there is no mention of Quickly. Which is a framework that allows you to develop applications quickly.

Please note: I did receive a free copy of this book via the O’Reilly Blogger review programme.