I'm lucky enough that publishers occasionally send me free copies of books completely out of the blue. Last week I got possibly the most unexpected book I've ever recieved - a copy of the new edition of the Python Cookbook.
After scratching my head a bit, I remembered getting an email several months ago from the editor asking for my permission to credit me for a tip that they were using in the book. I was confused as to how anything I'd said could be of any use to a Python programmer, but after a fair amount of Googling I found what I was looking for.
It seems that a couple of years ago I got (briefly) involved in a discussion on the ActiveState Python board. They were discussing sorting algorithms and someone said that Python's "Decorate-Sort-Undecorate" (or DSU) method was very close to Perl's Schwartzian Transform. My sole input to the discussion was to point out that it was, in fact, closer to the Guttman-Rosler Transform.
And that's the fact that someone picked up on and thought would be useful enough to mention in the Python Cookbook. So there I am credited in recipe 5.2 on "Sorting a List of Strings Case-Insensitively" (along with Guido!) And that's why I got a free copy of the book.
Hi Davorg. In all humility, it was me who first noticed this error in the Python Cookbook, as proved by
this post.
After my fwp post, I was delighted to
see you post a correction
to the
Python Cookbook web site
on 16 July 2003.
Maybe you forgot you did that.
Re:Hey that was me!
davorg on 2005-04-06T14:05:09
Well that, at least, explains how I heard about the discussion and found my way to the Python site. To be honest I _had_ completely forgotten about it until I got the email from the Python Cookbook team (which, it seems, was in October last year).
Anyway I'm sorry if I beat you to it in replying to the Python discussion.Re:Hey that was me!
oneiron on 2005-04-06T14:12:26
No need for apology. Hope you enjoy the book.
;-) I'd long forgotten about that exchange also. I don't mind missing out on a free book because I've lost interest in Python since then and am pouring all my energy into learning Perl 6 nowadays. ^.^ Re:Hey that was me!
Aristotle on 2005-04-07T23:26:32
The choice of smart and beautiful people.;-)
