Learning Python

Python Documentation and Books

There are three kinds of sources of published information on Python: the standard Python documentation set, published books, and online material.

The Standard Python Documentation Set

The standard Python documentation set includes five separate documents. They are all available in various formats (HTML, PDF, and PostScript, among others) at http://www.python.org/doc/. They are:

The Tutorial

A fast-paced introduction to the language that most current Python programmers used to learn Python. It assumes a fair bit of previous programming knowledge, so novices tend to find it overwhelming in places, and it doesn’t give Python’s object-oriented features their due.

The Library Reference

The most important of the Python books. It lists all the built-in functions and what the built-in type methods and semantics are, and describes almost all the modules that make up the standard distribution. It’s well worth keeping on your local hard disk and consulting when in doubt about a specific function’s interface or semantics, or when you can’t remember specific method names for the built-in objects.

The Language Reference

The most formal specification of the language itself. It gives the precise definition of syntactic operations, precedence rules, etc. Most users happily ignore it, but it does give the final word on intricate details of the language.

Extending and Embedding

A document describing the precise rules of interaction between Python and C extensions ...