Each of these twenty Python Interviews can inspire and refresh your relationship with Python and the people who make Python what it is today. This book invites you to immerse in the Python landscape, and let these remarkable programmers show you how you too can connect and share with Python programmers around the world.
If you're extremely eager to learn about the Python community, than this might be the book for you. Otherwise I really wouldn't recommend it.
A lot of interviews in the book are the same; the same questions gets asked ("Why is Python such a good fit for data science?" and "Do you think people should move on to Python 3.X?"), the person answering them gives the exact same answer to them and a lot of them don't really give insight to Python as a whole.
The thing I disliked the most about this book are the bold "quotes" the writer add in each paragraph. These parts (to me) don't add anything to the overal interview and straight up just repeat a sentence you have read five seconds ago/are going to read in the next five seconds.
That said, there are some really good interviews in there too and some good history on the creation on Python and certain libraries, and it's really interesting to read about the background of a lot Python developers and the reasons why they learned to program. For someone who isn't active in the Python-Dev community, I've learned alot about what people would like to see changed and added to the language.
It was interesting to read how members of PSF and PYCON are doing things. I was more surprised people from all sort of backgrounds worked in the core of python. A Lot of answers were repeating but that is because some questions were same for each person interviewed.
May be ideal for an undergrad or high schooler that has hopes of becoming a software engineer, but the interviews are a bit too similar for someone beyond that to derive great benefit. That said, as another reviewer mentioned, the inner workings of the PSF were the highlight of the text.
Ok, in general, I love this series of Interviews from PackT. I enjoyed most of the interviews in this book.
But I had two problems that bugged the crap out of me.
1) The Bold-type Snippets used imeediately before or after a segment were generally superfluous. And distracting.
2) The Interviewer got trapped by the very fixed nature of his question list. It left him less room to follow some of the interesting differences between interviewees, and more repetitive in their widely held, consistent responses. If perhaps he had built on prior responses, the latter respondents could have elaborated, argued, or amplified the differences in their position.
Informative. Would have loved little bit more technical depth.
Come back to this book if: * need arguments to apply python in corporate environments * get impulses for python 3 std lib functions I may not yet use (async io, f strings,..) * understand the process of improving python esp. last two-three interviews in the book * understand perspective of python core developers on current (well 2017) shortcomings of the language (Gil / multiprocessing, performance wrt Julia)
It was interesting to me to find out how all of these different people got into programming and then into python as well as how they all use and are involved with python in different ways. The rest of it was pretty repetitive.