Rating: 

The book offers very useful short introductions to a wide variety of important topics, with just enough info to get you started. You will very quickly need to move on to more thorough resources, but this book will very quickly get you started.

My first exposure to the book was through an extract posted as an article to onlamp.com, the subject being GUI programming using wxPython.

Here are a few peeves with the book. Several major examples revolve around a financial preogramming library which is not given in the book, and which doesn't seem to be available online anymore. This doesn't completely wipe out the value of those exampes, but it severely weakens the book. The COM and DCOM information is distributed across 3 or 4 chapters, which sems a bit odd. COM is a big subject and does affect many areas of functionality so perhaps there is no ideal way to handle it.

Python has moved on a bit from when this book was written, but I found that to be less of a problem than I expected. Even so O'Reilly - please update this book, as you have a number of your other Python books. Your still have a way to go before your current range of Python material is decently up to date.

Simon Hibbs