How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
I indeed find the formatting quality of the site to be superior. As mentioned below by the author.
"""
I know some people don’t like AI. Without it, this book wouldn’t exist. The book is free, so if AI bothers you more than the resulting product might benefit you, please ignore this book.
Using Claude made me realize how many compromises I’ve made on books in the past. I would get a good idea about something (for example, automatically interleaving commented output in the listings). I either couldn’t implement it, or it seemed too hard, so I didn’t do it. But with AI I can explore and often implement every whim, from things as seemingly straightforward as inserting a new chapter to ones as daunting as that commented-output system. The result is much better than anything I managed before. I keep going until I’ve tweaked everything that occurs to me.
"""
> “But with AI I can explore and often implement every whim, from things as seemingly straightforward as…”
I had a powerful misreading. I thought the author was saying they used AI to help write chapters they had struggled with before (uh? Yea, it seemed strange for the author of a Python book having trouble with Python…). How about writing custom chapters on request? Surely something that AI can do without trouble. At the right price point I would love a non-linear reading of the book and all that’s necessary for my to understand finally how hooks and callbacks work.
Interleaved commented output is literate programming, Knuth's WEB from '84. Never caught on because writing the prose was the bottleneck, not the typesetting tooling. If AI kills that bottleneck, great, but let's not pretend the format itself is new.
While the web version of this book looks fine, I only read books on my Kindle (with KOReader). Thankfully all I had to do was clone the source repo (https://github.com/BruceEckel/ThinkingInPython) and run `make epub` to get a nicely formatted file! It is a bit on the larger side at 7.4MB, but beggars can't be choosers... (On second thought, I'm gonna submit a PR to shrink it as it's mostly from the cover image being 6MB!)
The author is apparently still in the early stages of revising what the AI wrote, according to the README, so readers might want to hold off a bit on downloading the epub.
But both the license terms (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and the repo's LICENSE.md appear to agree that distributing the epub is OK.
ND clauses like this get murky fast — case law on what counts as a "derivative" for format-shifting is thin. Resizing an image for epub compatibility seems more like reproduction than remix, but nobody's tested that reading in court, so caution's reasonable here.
As mentioned in another comment, I don't think I'm allowed to distribute my modified EPUB as per the repo's license (nor do I really know the best way to do so, I don't use cloud storage). That said, I have written an Issue suggesting making an Action to build EPUBs and place them in the repo's releases: https://github.com/BruceEckel/ThinkingInPython/issues/12
If the people here comment on it, the author might be inclined to add this.
Ran into this exact license mess at a old job — someone forked a tool, added their own polish, then couldn't legally redistribute the binary because upstream license didn't allow it. Ended up just publishing a build script instead of the artifact. Saves everyone the headache.
I've only skimmed the book and even though it was clearly written with the help of AI, there is some very good (and for the Python world novel) stuff in it. I particularly liked the chapter on effects.[0] I very much share the author's opinion that properly managing effects is the future:
> The history of programming is a history of scaling barriers. Each time, the pattern is the same. Something the programmer tracks by hand works fine in small programs. Systems grow until hand-tracking fails. The solution moves that tracking into the language or the toolchain, and a generation later, nobody can imagine doing it by hand. […] Effects are the barrier we are inside right now, which is why it is hard to see.
I think I started in late 1990 but I did not like it.
Java has much improved though. Slow improvements, probably
in part due to Kotlin, but it has gotten better since then.
Even though I still think it is needlessly too verbose.
You're right that Python 3.15 is not fully released yet, but it's in prerelease which is defined as:
"""
After the first beta, no new features can go in, but feature fixes (including significant changes to new features), bug fixes, and security fixes are accepted for the upcoming feature release.
"""
So it's a fairly well known target. Bruce Eckel published the first edition of this book a quarter of a century ago - he has a pretty good handle on the progression of Python.
I think this is great, because it prepares you for the Python coding style for now to in two years, in contrast to from two years ago to now, so the information stays relevant longer.
Funny the performance section just progressively turned into "don't use Python if you need performance": Remove Python loops and vectorize with NumPy => use Numba JIT'd Python that is only partially compatible with CPython => just don't use Python and write Rust instead for hot loop.
Instead of jumping through all this hoops with Python, it's probably easier to write Rust from the beginning instead, because then you won't have to deal with the FFI complexity between Rust and Python at all.
Nice to see this! Personally, I prefer CC BY-SA to CC BY-NC-ND, but it is certainly much better than 100% protected. Over the years, I've built and maintain a list[1] of CC BY-SA Python books that have no access barriers, such as mandatory account creation or intrusive web trackers.
Since 2020 the entire Python ecosystem is a tightly organized, hierarchical structure that only serves the old boys country club to keep their overpaid positions in the industry. Many of these are mediocre, they just rule, let external people do real and hard work and then take the credit.
Any dissent is squashed, the official authorities have no qualms about lying and controlling the infrastructure so that no dissent can he heard.
It won't change since their inflated salaries depend on it, unless corporations catch on and fire them (like Google did).
I've used and been involved in my Python community since the late '90s, and I wish I could say you're totally off the mark here, but... It hits closer to the mark than I'd like. There is a subset of the Python community that I dearly love, but these days the bulk of the Python leadership makes me reluctant to be involved with it.
I guess maybe it's a time marches on thing and the leadership serves a very different community than the one I remember. Which is fine if that's what's happening. But I'm not entirely convinced that that is the extent of the story.
> Better invest in learning a language with multiple implementations like C++
As someone who has spent a little too much of their life having to deal with one cross-implementation C++ incompatibility or another, all I have to say is "good luck with that."
> Since 2020 the entire Python ecosystem is a tightly organized, hierarchical structure that only serves the old boys country club
Python leadership isn't great, but again to compare it to c++ at least they're not defending and keeping around a convicted rapist and possessor of CSAM.
Since this is autogenerated, is it possible that it's going to be auto updated as new versions of python come out? That'd be pretty cool. It'd be interesting to see this kind of thing unfold itself into a book.
When I feed it into an LLM, do you think it's going to improve the output of the code, or will it need additional prompting?
I posted this link and found out about it on episide 121 of a podcast called Happy Path Programming, which Bruce Eckel hosts. I was aware that he had started and subsequently abandoned writing the book, so was excited to hear he had used Claude to clean up all of his old material for the book.
I had created something along the same lines - a platform for devs to understand Python deeply, and was trying to see if there was a market for such content. The thing that I realised is that even with AI, there has to be distribution available for things like this to gain traction.
Why do I need to do that? I pay Anthropic so that Claude will know it for me. There's not much skill needed to get things done these days -- or at least, we've distilled the skill.
"What if it goes wrong?" -- LLMs are already better at debugging than they are at writing code in the first place. They're also already better than all the software engineers I know.
I think what people call 'AI slop' is probably just unedited content. I actually like this content quite a bit. Rather than whether it was made with AI, I think what matters is whether it accurately matches the specification
It depends which people. For a very large contingent “slop” describes ALL GenAI output and is a more of a moral commentary on the use of the technology than an assessment of its qualitative features (it is, really, a statement that the use of AI makes it morally unacceptable to even consider its features.)
For others, sure, both “AI” and “slop" narrow rhe scope compared to the other one used alone.
Does anyone actually print these things and read cover to cover, or does "physical copy" here just mean PDF you can annotate? Web-native books like this usually lose something in print - the interactivity, live code, whatever.
I would only wish that on my enemies... For god's sake, if you're going to think in a programming language, pick one with strict referential transparency.
> Python exists to improve your productivity. The language aims to aid you as much as possible. It tries to hinder you as little as possible. It does not impose arbitrary rules or force a particular set of features.
Except that everything needs to be reified into a top-level class with a unique name, even if it's just a piece data that you pass into/return from a single function. Also whitespace matters.
I'm not sure I follow your meaning here. You can return unnamed lists, dictionaries, numbers, among others, or combinations of any of these. With some very light syntax sugar magic you can even make returning tuples look like your returning multiple values.
I'm not sure if I would call whitespace-as-syntax arbitrary, though it is opinionated. I admit though that for me it started feeling like a time saver once I got over my anti whitespace as syntax zealotry.
Ran the ebook build pipeline on something similar last year, Pandoc chokes on nested admonition blocks like this site uses. Rendering markdown to clean HTML with collapsible asides and working syntax highlighting without a JS framework is the unglamorous part nobody notices till it breaks.
""" I know some people don’t like AI. Without it, this book wouldn’t exist. The book is free, so if AI bothers you more than the resulting product might benefit you, please ignore this book.
Using Claude made me realize how many compromises I’ve made on books in the past. I would get a good idea about something (for example, automatically interleaving commented output in the listings). I either couldn’t implement it, or it seemed too hard, so I didn’t do it. But with AI I can explore and often implement every whim, from things as seemingly straightforward as inserting a new chapter to ones as daunting as that commented-output system. The result is much better than anything I managed before. I keep going until I’ve tweaked everything that occurs to me. """