Dive Into Python, a free Python book for experienced programmers, has been updated for the first time in almost four months. There are no completely new sections, but there are tons of bug fixes, corrections, and edits. (You can read the revision history to see what’s new. Thanks to everyone who contributed.) The book is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License; you can read the book online, or download it in a variety of formats.
This book, if you print the PDF version, is now 208 pages long. (The Word version, with different margins and fonts, is a whopping 263 pages.) When it was a mere 20 pages, my manager at the time read it over lunch, and we had this conversation:
Tom: “This is really good. You could probably make some money off this someday.”
Me: “Maybe, but I’m not going to. I’m giving it away for free.”
Tom: “Why would you do that?”
Me: “Because this is the way I want the world to work.”
Tom: “But the world doesn’t work that way.”
Me: “Mine does.”
(I later joked to the same manager that Dive Into Python was so successful because its home page had two of the three words that guarantee a web site’s success: “free” and “download”. The third one, of course, is “sex”. The book is now included in ActiveState’s ActivePython distribution, the FreeBSD ports distribution, has been translated into four languages, and is consistently downloaded 250 times a day. By the time I’m 30, I estimate that it will have been read by over 100,000 different people in six languages. It’s not quite the Great American Novel, but I’ll take what I can get.)
