Natural Language Processing with Python

Further Reading

This chapter has touched on many topics in programming, some specific to Python, and some quite general. We’ve just scratched the surface, and you may want to read more about these topics, starting with the further materials for this chapter available at http://www.nltk.org/.

The Python website provides extensive documentation. It is important to understand the built-in functions and standard types, described at http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html and http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html. We have learned about generators and their importance for efficiency; for information about iterators, a closely related topic, see http://docs.python.org/library/itertools.html. Consult your favorite Python book for more information on such topics. An excellent resource for using Python for multimedia processing, including working with sound files, is (Guzdial, 2005).

When using the online Python documentation, be aware that your installed version might be different from the version of the documentation you are reading. You can easily check what version you have, with import sys; sys.version. Version-specific documentation is available at http://www.python.org/doc/versions/.

Algorithm design is a rich field within computer science. Some good starting points are (Harel, 2004), (Levitin, 2004), and (Knuth, 2006). Useful guidance on the practice of software development is provided in (Hunt & Thomas, 2000) and (McConnell, 2004).