I indeed find the formatting quality of the site to be superior. As mentioned below by the author.
"""
I know some people don’t like AI. Without it, this book wouldn’t exist. The book is free, so if AI bothers you more than the resulting product might benefit you, please ignore this book.
Using Claude made me realize how many compromises I’ve made on books in the past. I would get a good idea about something (for example, automatically interleaving commented output in the listings). I either couldn’t implement it, or it seemed too hard, so I didn’t do it. But with AI I can explore and often implement every whim, from things as seemingly straightforward as inserting a new chapter to ones as daunting as that commented-output system. The result is much better than anything I managed before. I keep going until I’ve tweaked everything that occurs to me.
"""
I originally learned Java in 2000 from Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java"
Me too, one year before you. A classic.
"The book targets Python 3.15 and later"
That's a bit weird, Python 3.15 isn't even fully released yet.
You're right that Python 3.15 is not fully released yet, but it's in prerelease which is defined as:
"""
After the first beta, no new features can go in, but feature fixes (including significant changes to new features), bug fixes, and security fixes are accepted for the upcoming feature release.
"""
So it's a fairly well known target. Bruce Eckel published the first edition of this book a quarter of a century ago - he has a pretty good handle on the progression of Python.
Definitions and status for all releases is at https://devguide.python.org/versions/
Since this is autogenerated, is it possible that it's going to be auto updated as new versions of python come out? That'd be pretty cool. It'd be interesting to see this kind of thing unfold itself into a book.
When I feed it into an LLM, do you think it's going to improve the output of the code, or will it need additional prompting?
Care to provide some examples? Would certainly add to the discussion
The "Thinking in" series shaped how an entire generation learned to program. What made those books work wasn't the language coverage, it was that Eckel focused on mental models rather than syntax reference. You came away understanding how to think about the language, not just how to write it. Curious whether that approach translates well to Python, which arguably has a less opinionated object model than Java did.
Where can I get a physical copy of this?