I feel really bad about this comment on my book : How To Be Dissappointed in Something You Recommend.
Just a quick word about the try, return finally code pattern, since I had some feedback about it. I would like to mention that this code pattern is perfectly right:
def function():
try:
return something
finally:
do something
I should have explained it better, because this pattern is not used a lot by people, so you can think that “do something” is called after the return of the function, which is not the case.
For the typos now:
The first thing I did wrong: when I started the book, I wanted, as I did in my previous book, to run unit tests on the book itself to avoid those mistakes. That said, the previous one was in Latex, which is quite simple to interact with, and this one is in OpenOffice, because that is how the editor works. I had to write a script to extract the Python code from the Ooo file, to unit test it. I didn’t. I simply ran out of time, as usual when you have deadlines on books.
The second thing I did wrong: I should have told the editor to wait a bit, I didn’t.
But Packt does Print On Demand, so I know that the Errata page I am maintaining here : http://atomisator.ziade.org/wiki/Errata, is being processed by the editor, and that the typos will be removed from the book at some point, without having to wait for a second edition.
I’ll update this blog entry as soon as I know the status on this.
I am really sorry Calvin, and all the people that are suffering from these typos.
