March 2001
Intermediate to advanced
1296 pages
38h 8m
English
Content preview from Programming Python, Second EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
User-Friendly Program Launchers
Suppose, for just a moment, that you wish to ship Python programs to an audience that may be in the very early stages of evolving from computer user to computer programmer. Maybe you are shipping a Python application to nontechnical users; or perhaps you’re interested in shipping a set of cool Python demo programs on a Python book’s CD-ROM (see http://examples.oreilly.com/python2). Whatever the reason, some of the people who will use your software can’t be expected to do any more than click a mouse -- much less edit their system configuration files to set things like PATH and PYTHONPATH per your programs’ assumptions. Your software will have to configure itself.
Luckily, Python scripts can do that too. In the next two sections, we’re going to see two modules that aim to automatically launch programs with minimal assumptions about the environment on the host machine:
Launcher.pyis a library of tools for automatically configuring the shell environment in preparation for launching a Python script. It can be used to set required shell variables -- both the PATH system program search path (used to find the “python” executable), and the PYTHONPATH module search path (used to resolve imports within scripts). Because such variable settings made in a parent program are inherited by spawned child programs, this interface lets scripts preconfigure search paths for other scripts.LaunchBrowser.pyaims to portably locate and start an Internet browser program ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.