Chapter 1-3 review comments

[davewhipp]

Hi!

Below is a checklist of comments that were raised in the review of the drafts of chapters 1-3. Please edit this comment when needed to check off some of the items on the list as you fix them. You can also comment below, but it would be good to try to keep the list up to date here.

• Some materials are missing
  • The authors don’t seem to report what version of Python (and Python packages) they are using in the text.
  • Missing multiple Preface sections
  • Text missing for section 2.4.6
  • Text missing for section 2.4.7
  • Text missing for section 2.4.8
• Sloppy punctuation, formatting, grammar
  • Page 4, Section 1
  • Page 9, Section 1.3.3 (“The in the world today [ˆtop500] have several million processor cores and the ability to calculate more than 100,000 trillion second [ˆflops].”)
• Typesetting issues
  • Page 7 ({term}computer)
• Code formatting
  • Page 136, Section 3.3.3
• Images
  • Some images should be higher resolution (Page 133)
• Some parts of the text on p.4
• On page 10, authors jump into Jupyter notebook/lab without the prior introduction of it
• On page 12, the expected solution is based on a combination of functions, which is introduced just after that.
• In section 1.5.4.1 (and later) authors sometimes use lower case temperature (inconsistent with the previous usage).
• On page 14, authors are mixing camelCase and snake_case for variables.
• Formatting of a long list on p.19 is broken in the PDF
• The book is heavily using Traceback to illustrate the error behaviour
• Station names could omit "Helsinki"
• Figures are often misplaced
• Section 1.6.4 - looping over a list while changing it in that loop is not recommended practice and can lead to confusing situations.
• P.39 mentions bitwise operators without explaining what bitwise means, which is only confusing
• P.43 mentions PEP without any explanation of what that is.
• In section 1.11.2.1 is an incomplete sentence.
• On p.59 is "Let's check the the contents"
• P.60 talking about the length of an index while printing only head, therefore it is not possible to read the full length from the tail.
• Section 2.1.5 mentions tuple, but it was not introduced before. Similar to the dictionary on p. 68, which even refers to the first chapter (where it is not introduced)
• 2.2.2.5 is referring to previous in a confusing way regarding view and copy. Maybe some paragraph order should be switched?
• In the beginning, was introduced sorting and other methods on a list which work in place. Now we talk about pandas sorting and other methods which do not work in place. This is a major distinction (and a major source of confusion) and should be properly mentioned and explained.
• Interactive bokeh plots not shown in a PDF
• I would suggest more explicit geographic content with Python in these first three chapters, but these chapters’ aim was basic programming. And with that in mind, I would not necessarily change.