Python Cookbook

Organization

This book has 17 chapters, each of which is devoted to a particular kind of recipe, such as algorithms, text processing, or databases. Each chapter contains an introduction, written by an expert in the field, followed by recipes selected from the online cookbook (or, in some cases, specially added) and edited to fit the book’s formatting and style requirements. Alex Martelli did the vast majority of the editing, with some help from David Ascher. This editing proved to be quite a challenge, as the original recipes varied widely in their organization and level of sophistication. Also, with about 200 authors involved, there were about 200 different “voices” in the text. We tried to maintain this variety of styles, given the collaborative nature of this book. However, each recipe was edited, sometimes considerably, to make it as accessible and useful as possible, with enough uniformity in structure and presention to maximize the usability of the book as a whole.

Chapter 1, Python Shortcuts, introduction by David Ascher

This chapter includes recipes for many common techniques that don’t really fit into any of the other, more specific recipe categories.

David Ascher is a co-editor of this volume. David’s background spans physics, vision research, scientific visualization, computer graphics, a variety of programming languages, co-authoring Learning Python (O’Reilly), teaching Python, and, these days, a slew of technical and nontechnical tasks such as architecting developer ...