Learning Python

Acknowledgments

We’d like to express our gratitude to all the people who played a part in developing this book, but this is too short a book to list them all. But we’d like to give a special thanks to our editor, Frank Willison, and O’Reilly in general, for supporting another Python book. Thanks also to everyone who took part in the early review of this book—Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, Just van Rossum, Andrew Kuchling, Dennis Allison, Greg Ward, and Jennifer Tanksley. And for creating such an enjoyable and useful language, we owe an especially large debt to Guido, and the rest of the Python community; like most freeware systems, Python is the product of many heroic efforts.

Mark Also Says:

Since writing Programming Python, I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the country teaching Python to beginners. Besides racking up frequent flyer miles, these courses helped me refine the core language material you’ll see in the first part of this book. I’d like to thank the early students of my course, at Badger, Lawrence Livermore, and Fermi Labs, in particular. Your feedback played a big role in shaping my contributions to this text. I also want to give a special thanks to Softronex, for the chance to teach Python in Puerto Rico this summer (a better perk would be hard to imagine).

Finally, a few personal notes of thanks. To coauthor David Ascher, for his hard work and patience on this project. To the people I worked with at Lockheed Martin while writing this book, including my teammate ...