Errata

Beazley, David M. Python Essential Reference (5th edition) Addison-Wesley, 2019 is not a released title,
there is however a fourth edition a/v for sale at book vendors.
I also see available the Python Distilled which looks similar, but that's the wrong date, it appears. The theme I found of knowing and theorizing through book knowledge is interesting, I'm interested in the book we are referring to, to learn through. Please point me in the right direction?

In item 14 at the bottom of the page, it says, "Notice that this line and the next two are indented." It should say, "Notice that this line and the next three are indented." (The next three lines are lines 15, 16, 17, which are all indented.)

in the phrase ... "are successors to C and C++ that avoid" ... we have a line break in the middle of the name of the language C++. We have C at the end of line 20, and ++ at the start of line 21. This looks very strange, to allow a line break in the middle of the name C++.

In the phrase "it will be around for while"
it should say "it will be around for a while"

"add the first five digits"
should say:
"add the first four digits"

(Someone might argue that, on page 54, we are adding five digits, namely 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, but if we look ahead to the top of page 55 (where we do it in one step), we are only adding four digits, namely, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. Moreover, it is pretty clear that the "0" in the sum on page 54 is just to initialize the sum. So I think the book should say "add the first four digits", please.)

“Python is calculating the subtraction on the righthand side, remembering the result, and then assigning it to a on the left side of the + sign. It’s faster and neater than using a temporary variable.”

Instead of + it should be =.

The spacing on the tabs in this example is not consistent. It should look like this:

>>> print('\tabc')
abc
>>> print('a\tbc')
a bc
>>> print('ab\tc')
ab c
>>> print('abc\t')
abc

In the printed book, the first tab is 4 spaces, and the second tab is 4 spaces, but the third tab is 6 spaces (and, of course, we cannot tell how wide the fourth tab is). On the other hand, in the Python interpreter, all of the tabs should be the same width. Therefore, in the book, the tab spacing should consistently be the same width as well.

In the duck example (i.e., when word = "duck")
there are two identical lines, namely, this line of code occurs twice:
>>> poem.rfind(word)

The first sentences of the Generate Number Sequences with Range have an errand period where there should be a comma. To wit:

"The range() function returns a stream of numbers within a specified range. without first having to..."

That period should be a comma.

On page 91, in the section called Generate Number Sequences with range(), there are two typo's:

On the first line of this section, it reads "within a specified range. without"
and this period should be removed.

In the third paragraph in the section, we have:
"Like zip(), range() returns an iterable object"
but we have not (yet) learned about the zip() function at this point in the book. In the first edition of the book, the zip() function was covered shortly before this, so it made sense, but it does not make sense to mention the zip() function at this point in the second edition of the book.

I hope those two corrections are helpful for you!

In question 6.3, on line 3, please change:
found it!
to be (instead) like this:
'found it!'
with single quotes around it. That way, it is consistent with question 6.2 and also consistent with the other things in question 6.2 and 6.3, such as 'too low' and 'oops' (which both have single quotes around them).

In line 3 of question 6.2, in the phrase
"is less than guess me"
there is an underscore missing. It should say:
"is less than guess_me"

Under Create with [] there are several examples, including the first one which says

>>> empty_list = [ ]

There is a space between the brackets, which is incorrect and inconsistent with the way you present empty lists in other places in the book.

You give an example of changing the days of the week from English to French.

>>>English = 'Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday'
>>>french = 'Lundi', 'Mardi', 'Mercredi'

Note that days of the week are not capitalized in French, so the second line should say

>>>french = 'lundi', 'mardi', 'mercredi'

Read the sentence above "Add or Change an Item by [key]:
"The section 'Iterate Multiple Sequences with zip()" on p. 1110 introduces you to the zip() function,..."

Do you thin the referred-to section is upcoming or in the past? It is in fact in the past, on p. 110, meaning IMHO "introduces" should be "introduced", especially since your expectation, as stated in the Preface, is that these chapters are to be read in sequence.

For some reason, single and double quotes are mixed in this code block It's unnecessary and probably not pythonic to do it that way, so you may want to be consistent with one quote style (Single quotes is my guess) in the next printing.

Original text:
If it’s under a sibling directory called creatures: from ..creatures import
rougarou.


Is the correct path " ../creatures"?

"a" should be "%a" for the weekday abbrev row

I initially posted as unconfirmed. However I went back and based on what I was suspicious of, changed the line of code from :

villains.txt to villains.csv.

and also wrote it as a python script.

That successfully created the villains.csv file as per the example. I was able to open the .csv file with Macintosh Text Edit, BBEdit and Excel and it looked as shown in the book. The Excel file looked best.

This time the Pandas example worked exactly as shown in the book also.

The book should be changed to reflect this.


Example 16-1
Does not create villains.csv file on my computer, but creates a villains.txt file. I am using an iMac and macOS Big Sur, version 11.6. Python version 3.8.9.

I do not know if this is due to the line that contains:

with open('villains.txt', 'wt') as fout:

as shown in the book.

or if this should be a python script rather than in immediate mode as were the previous examples?

This isn't as much an error in the code of listing 18-14 (iamovies.py) as a tip for getting it to work. When I tried to run it I got KeyErrors every time. After some debugging it turns out that the errors were due to missing descriptions in many of the entries in the archive (there is always a title and always an identifier). The best way to handle this, I found, was to replace 'doc["description"]' in line 22 with doc.get("description"), which returns None if there is no such key instead of a KeyError. Once I made this change the script worked as advertised.

Replace the "start" in last 2 lines with "number"