Programming Python, 4th Edition

Preface

“And Now for Something Completely Different…”

This book explores ways to apply the Python programming language in common application domains and realistically scaled tasks. It’s about what you can do with the language once you’ve mastered its fundamentals.

This book assumes you are relatively new to each of the application domains it covers—GUIs, the Internet, databases, systems programming, and so on—and presents each from the ground up, in tutorial fashion. Along the way, it focuses on commonly used tools and libraries, rather than language fundamentals. The net result is a resource that provides readers with an in-depth understanding of Python’s roles in practical, real-world programming work.

As a subtheme, this book also explores Python’s relevance as a software development tool—a role that many would classify as well beyond those typically associated with “scripting.” In fact, many of this book’s examples are scaled specifically for this purpose; among these, we’ll incrementally develop email clients that top out at thousands of lines of code. Programming at this full scale will always be challenging work, but we’ll find that it’s also substantially quicker and easier when done with Python.

This Fourth Edition has been updated to present the language, libraries, and practice of Python 3.X. Specifically, its examples use Python 3.1—the most recent version of Python at the time of writing—and its major examples were tested successfully under the third alpha release of Python ...