Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: This is an excellent book, which not only gives a useful introduction to Python, but also gives very good introduction to the topics of networking, databases, and anything and everything web-app related. And a pile of other stuff too.Each section starts from the assumption that the reader knows nothing about the topic, yet doesn't patronise, or paddle along at too slow a pace. There are a few things that bothered me about this book: It would have been really nice to have pointers to further information and articles for each topic, a better index and fewer references to language features that aren't actually explained anywhere (such as list comprehension). Apart from these smaller complaints this book is really very good. Perhaps the bast thing about it is that it explains how all the various technologies fit together. Well worth buying.
Rating:
Summary: Substantially Impressed!
Review: This is one of the best overall web programming books I've seen. The author has a great ability to present highly technical information in a very straight forward, easy to understand manner. The book provides a wealth of information about Python as well as many other very important, and often overlooked, aspects of building web sites and programming. Eagerly look forward to seeing his next release. I hope it's soon and is as well written as this is! I'll definitely buy from him again!
Rating:
Summary: Substantially Impressed!
Review: This is one of the best overall web programming books I've seen. The author has a great ability to present highly technical information in a very straight forward, easy to understand manner. The book provides a wealth of information about Python as well as many other very important, and often overlooked, aspects of building web sites and programming. Eagerly look forward to seeing his next release. I hope it's soon and is as well written as this is! I'll definitely buy from him again!
Rating: 
Summary: Good introductory work curiously lacking in some areas
Review: Though the title makes it appear more limited, this volume "is intended to be a suitable introductory Python book", an all-in-one reference to not only web applications, but also general client-server networking, relational databases, XML, and Internet protocols like POP and NNTP. Though not the best introduction to Python (I would instead recommend O'Reilly's Learning Python) it does a good job of gathering together disparate information and presenting the topics clearly and with well thought-out code. However, this is not a good book on CGI, HTML form handling, templating, and other common web application tasks. Holden chooses as his major example to extend an asynchronous web server into a web application framework. Thus he does not deal with Apache (or any other pre-existing server) and Python integration issues. The coverage of Internet protocols given here is only slightly extended from the standard documentation. IMAP4 gets one paragraph, in which Holden notes its superiority to POP3 but laments the lack of space to cover it! However, non-Python topics like client-server architectures are explained at a nice level for beginners. There is a balance of code and exposition in this book, both presented clearly though in a rather formal tone. The layout is excellent, being very easy to read and pleasing on the eye. The index is great. This book is recommended for inexperienced programmers but lacks enough original work to make it of value to those already coding for the web.
Rating:
Summary: Good introductory work curiously lacking in some areas
Review: Though the title makes it appear more limited, this volume "is intended to be a suitable introductory Python book", an all-in-one reference to not only web applications, but also general client-server networking, relational databases, XML, and Internet protocols like POP and NNTP. Though not the best introduction to Python (I would instead recommend O'Reilly's Learning Python) it does a good job of gathering together disparate information and presenting the topics clearly and with well thought-out code. However, this is not a good book on CGI, HTML form handling, templating, and other common web application tasks. Holden chooses as his major example to extend an asynchronous web server into a web application framework. Thus he does not deal with Apache (or any other pre-existing server) and Python integration issues. The coverage of Internet protocols given here is only slightly extended from the standard documentation. IMAP4 gets one paragraph, in which Holden notes its superiority to POP3 but laments the lack of space to cover it! However, non-Python topics like client-server architectures are explained at a nice level for beginners. There is a balance of code and exposition in this book, both presented clearly though in a rather formal tone. The layout is excellent, being very easy to read and pleasing on the eye. The index is great. This book is recommended for inexperienced programmers but lacks enough original work to make it of value to those already coding for the web.
| 
