A lively and engaging Python-centered entry in the QuickStart Guide series.
Oliver offers a comprehensive guide to one of the world’s most important programming languages in this nonfiction work.
As the author points out in this new addition to the excellent QuickStart Guide series, the Python programming language is fundamental to our current world, from Google to Spotify to IBM to wide-reaching governmental systems (he enthusiastically extols Python as “an awesome programming language that lets you do a wide variety of tasks—everything from system utilities to business programs to games to website backends and even artificial intelligence”). Focusing on Version 3 of Python, Oliver presents his readers with a series of demonstrations and hands-on exercises. He starts with the basics—the installation of Python on a computer (not a phone or tablet)—and proceeds from there to outline the basic functions of Python, progressing to advanced functionality, statistics, and internet interaction, always advancing the complexity of Python “expressions.” As with all QuickStart guides, this one comes replete with bullet points, charts, and inset sections, and Oliver also includes increasingly complicated programming exercises for readers to do. He accompanies these exercises with technical commentary about the material he’s chosen to include: “While this is a perfectly acceptable way to handle this issue,” he writes, “it uses more lines and is more complex, so I opted to perform the casting inline.” Cumulatively, this choice to personalize his material emerges as the book’s greatest strength; it accentuates the signature feature of the entire QuickStart series of guides: the detailed approachability that thoroughly explains a subject without condescending to the reader. Oliver’s book is very much not for dummies or complete idiots, and his methodical, step-by-step walk-through is sure to calm the anxieties of entry-level programmers, although it might also shed light on some aspects of Python even for longtime users of the program. Readers looking to deepen their understanding of this ubiquitous programming language will find this book invaluable.
A lively and engaging Python-centered entry in the QuickStart Guide series.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781636100371
Page Count: 394
Publisher: ClydeBank Media LLC
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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