SIG-related Books

This section contains books related to the topics of the various Python Special Interest Groups (SIGs). While none of these books is Python-specific, they'll help you understand and use the tools that the SIGs have produced.

There are no Python-specific books about design patterns or ActiveX or image processing, but a book can be useful and relevant to Python programmers even though it may use other languages for sample code. A book that has page after page of tricky C++ code to implement an ActiveX control may not be helpful; one that covers the material well, has useful pseudo-code, and some sample C++ code may be perfect. This is an attempt to list such titles. akuchling@acm.org

Titles are sorted alphabetically by author.

DB-sig

An Introduction to Database Systems; C.J. Date; Hardcover.

Database Principles, Programming, Performance; Patrick O'Neil; Hardcover.

Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images; Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell; Hardcover.

Discusses algorithms and techniques for compressing, indexing, and searching large document archives.

Doc-sig

PARSEME.1ST: SGML for Software Developers; Sean McGrath; Hardcover.

Approaches SGML from the software engineer's viewpoint. Some of the book discusses using Python for SGML processing.

GUI-sig

Effective Tcl/Tk Programming; Mark Harrison, Michael McLennan; Paperback.

"Full of practical advice and examples, many of which are useful for Tkinter users, too."

X User Tools; Linda Mui, Valerie Quercia; Paperback.

Tcl and the Tk toolkit; John Ousterhout; Paperback.

This is not up-to-date for Tk 8.0; hopefully a revision will come out before too long.

"...the Ousterhout one is a model of completeness and clarity. It is one of these rare technical books that are excellent both as a tutorial (explains things clearly and shows you why they are like they are) and as a reference (you can get back to it and find the stuff you need, and it's exhaustive, and it's well organised into chapters describing the various features)."

"Hopelessly outdated."

Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk; Brent Welch; Paperback.

Image-sig

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice; James D. Foley (Editor); Hardcover.

Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats; James D. Murray, William VanRyper; Paperback.

The Image Processing Handbook, 2nd Edition; John C. Russ; Hardcover.

Matrix-sig

LAPACK User's Guide; E. Anderson, Z. Bai, C. Bischof, Demmel J., J. Dongarra; Paperback.

"For those who want to know how the LinearAlgebra module really works."

Matrix Computations, 2nd edition; Gene H. Golub & Charles Van Loan; Paperback.

Numerical Recipes in C; William H. Press, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling; Hardcover.

"One of the big problems in computational science is that most users of numerical methods have no training at all in that business, whereas the experts in numerical analysis make no effort to explain their work to non-specialists. Numerical Recipes tries to be the bridge between the two worlds; it's not perfect, but there's nothing better. My recommendation is to read Numerical Recipes to learn about the methods, but not to use the code for real-life work. There are much better libraries around for almost any application."

Objc-sig

Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language; NeXT. May be out of print. An online version is available.

"The definitive book on the Objective-C language."

Pattern-sig

A Timeless Way of Building; Christopher Alexander; Hardcover.

It's about architecture, not software, but it's still a "should-have", as an introduction to the philosophy behind patterns.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein; Hardcover.

"The origin of the design pattern concept. A must-have."

Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture : A System of Patterns; Frank Buschmann, Regine Meunier, Hans Rohnert, pet Sommerlad; Hardcover.

UML Distilled : Applying the Standard Object Modeling Language; Martin Fowler, Kendall Scott; Paperback.

According to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) page, this book "provides a concise introduction to the UML within the context of object-oriented analysis and design."

Patterns of Software: Tales From the Software Community; Richard P. Gabriel; Hardcover.

"Philosophical, good background; only part 1 is of interest."

Design Patterns; Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides; Hardcover.

The first book to apply patterns to software, and the one that started it all. In the pattern community, the authors are referred to as the Gang of Four, or GoF.

Design Patterns for Object-Oriented Software Development; Wolfgang Pree; Hardcover.

"Somewhat like the Gang of Four's book, but more quickly written."

Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development; Bruce F. Webster; Paperback.

"As far as I know it's the only collection of "negative patterns", i.e. things that you should NOT do, each one described on two pages, covering everything from OO concepts, analyses, design, to implementation, reuse, organization, management and politics. [No source code at all.] But it has a commented bibliography."

Pythonmac-sig

None yet. Help!

Pythonwin-sig

Developing Professional Applications in Windows 95 and Windows NT Using MFC; Marshall Brain; Paperback.

Inside OLE; Kraig Brockschmidt; Paperback.

"Although it is outdated and hard to read, it is still the most complete explanatory book. I still recommend it for coverage of most of the OLE technologies although it details many technologies that you may not be interested in. In contrast to Inside COM, it requires considerable patience and stamina to read. It normally takes me about 2 months to read it and I have now done so 4 times (maybe I'm just slow...)."

Understanding ActiveX and OLE; David Chappell; Paperback.

Windows Sockets Network Programming; Bob Quinn, Dave Shute; Hardcover.

Inside COM; Dale Rogerson; Paperback.

"It's quite a good first book for learning COM as it is a very easy read. However it covers a lot of material fairly lightly, and you will need to read more, especially about Automation..."

MFC Internals; George Shepherd, Scott Wingo; Paperback.

"The second book anyone gets on MFC should be this one. Don't know what the first book should be, though."

Suggestions for other Windows-related books helpful to Python programmers would be very welcome. akuchling@acm.org

String-sig

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools; Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman; Hardcover.

Mastering Regular Expressions; Jeffrey E. F. Friedl; Paperback.

The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0; The Unicode Consortium; Paperback.

Thread-sig

Multithreading Applications in Win32: The Complete Guide to Threads; Jim Beveridge, Robert Wiener; Paperback.

Programming With POSIX Threads; David R. Butenhof; Paperback.

POSIX 4 : Programming for the Real World; Bill O. Gallmeister; Paperback.

Programming With Threads; Steve Kleiman, Devang Shah, Bart Smaalders; Paperback.

Multithreaded Programming With Pthreads; Bil Lewis, Daniel J. Berg

Threads Primer: A Guide to Solaris Multithreaded Programming; Bil Lewis, Daniel J. Berg; Paperback.

Pthreads Programming; Bradford Nichols, Dick Buttlar, Jacqueline Proulx Farrell, Brad Nichols; Paperback.

Web-sig

Apache: The Definitive Guide; Ben Laurie, Peter Laurie; Paperback.

HTML: The Definitive Guide; Chuck Musciano, Bill Kennedy; Paperback.

O'Reilly's World Wide Web Journal contains many introductory articles about Web-related topics:

• Vol. 1 Iss. 2: Key Specifications of the World Wide Web; World Wide Web Consortium (Editor); Paperback.
• Vol. 1 Iss. 2: The Web After Five Years; World Wide Web Consortium (Editor); Paperback.
• Vol. 1 Iss. 4: Building an Industrial Strength Web; World Wide Web Consortium (Editor); Paperback.
• Vol. 2 Iss. 2: Scripting Languages: Automating The Web; World Wide Web Consortium (Editor); Paperback.
• Vol. 2 Iss. 3: Web Security: A Matter of Trust; World Wide Web Consortium (Editor); Paperback.
• Vol. 2 Iss. 4: XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques; Dan Connolly (Editor); Paperback.

XML-sig

Vol. 2 Iss. 4: XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques; Dan Connolly (Editor); Paperback.

Collects various articles about XML, and the then-current XML working draft. The working draft is now obsolete, since the final recommendation has been issued, but the articles provide a good introduction to XML and to the purposes for which XML can be used.

PARSEME.1ST: SGML for Software Developers; Sean McGrath; Hardcover.

Approaches SGML from the software engineer's viewpoint. Some of the book discusses using Python for SGML processing.

The XML Handbook; Charles F. Goldfarb, Paul Prescod; Paperback.

Not yet available.