On 08/09/11 04:26, c smith wrote:
I found a book at the local library that covers python but it's 2.2. I already have been using 2.7 for basic stuff and would like to know if it's worth my time to read this book.
That depends on your experience level and what you are looking to get out of it.
The Python 2 series is very backwards compatible so virtually everything you read in the book will still work in Python 2.7. It's just that some new whizzy features have been added since 2.2 that it won't cover. But many of those features are not things the average programmer uses every day.
The vast majority of the standard library modules haven't changed that much and any information about those will probably still be accurate. Given you get to read it for free from the library I'd say yes, its very worthwhile.
But if you have been using Python for a while and want to dig deeper into its power features then it probably isn't worth reading because the changes in Python recently have focused on many of the more subtle things "under the covers" and 2.2 won't cover them,
can pickle deserialize things that were not serialized by python?
Not unless the thing that serialised them was deliberately copying Pythons serialisation format.
can it convert data into a python data type regardless of it was originally a 'c array' or something else that python doesn't support?
No, the nearest thing to that is the struct module. But there you have to know what you are reading and construct a format specifier to match.
-- Alan G Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.alan-g.me.uk/ _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
