Nice2Cats writes "Python is something of a programmer's dream and an author's nightmare. What
started life as a scripting tool for the Amoeba operating system has
matured into a full-blown programming language with such speed that every
book seems to be outdated in a year or two. To make matters worse for
publishers, the crew around Python's creator Guido van Rossum keeps adding
higher-level constructs such as iterators with every new release, reducing
reams of code to single-line idioms at half-year intervals. Because not
everybody has been able to keep up -- RedHat 7.3 infamously still ships
with version 1.5.2 as the default, while SuSE 8.0 is hanging in there with
version 2.2 -- authors are forced to cover stone age variants as well as
modern forms. Python is cross-platform (Unix/Linux, Mac, Microsoft), has
two underlying languages (C for Python, Java for Jython) and works with
various GUIs (Tkinter, wxWindows, Qt, GTK, curses, Swing). Given this
breadth of material, the idea of writing that most fragmented form of
a programming book, a 'Cookbook,' seems as crazy as, say, nailing a dead
parrot to its perch." Read Nice2Cats's review below of The Python Cookbook to see how well O'Reilly deals with dead parrots.