Programming Python, 3rd Edition

This Book’s Structure

Although code examples are reused throughout the book and later chapters build upon material in earlier chapters (e.g., GUIs), topics in this book are covered fairly independently and are grouped together in different parts. If a particular domain’s part doesn’t interest you, you can generally skip ahead to a part that does.

As a result, it’s not too much of a stretch to consider this edition as akin to four or five books in one. Its top-level structure underscores its application-topics focus (see the Table of Contents for a more fine-grained look at the book’s structure):

Part I, The Beginning

I start off with an overview of some of the main ideas behind Python and a quick sneak-preview chapter to whet your appetite. The sneak preview doesn’t teach much, but it serves as an introduction and demo for some of the topics to come, and as a refresher for core Python concepts such as OOP.

Part II, System Programming

This section explores the system-level interfaces in Python as well as their realistic applications. We’ll look at topics such as threading, directory walkers, processes, environment variables, and streams, and we will apply such tools to common system administration tasks such as directory searchers and file splitters.

Part III, GUI Programming

In this section, you’ll learn how to build portable GUIs with Python. The Tkinter toolkit is covered from the ground up as you move from basics to techniques to constructing complete programs. You’ll build text ...