Python Essential Reference, Second Edition

Table of contents

1. Copyright
2. About the Author
3. About the Technical Reviewers
4. Acknowledgments
5. Tell Us What You Think
6. Introduction
7. A Tutorial Introduction
   1. Running Python
   2. Variables and Arithmetic Expressions
   3. Conditionals
   4. File Input and Output
   5. Strings
   6. Lists and Tuples
   7. Loops
   8. Dictionaries
   9. Functions
   10. Classes
   11. Exceptions
   12. Modules
8. Lexical Conventions and Syntax
   1. Line Structure and Indentation
   2. Identifiers and Reserved Words
   3. Literals
   4. Operators, Delimiters, and Special Symbols
   5. Documentation Strings
9. Types and Objects
   1. Terminology
   2. Object Identity and Type
   3. Reference Counting and Garbage Collection
   4. References and Copies
   5. Built-in Types
   6. Special Methods
   7. Performance and Memory Considerations
10. Operators and Expressions
    1. Operations on Numbers
    2. Operations on Sequences
    3. Operations on Dictionaries
    4. Augmented Assignment
    5. The Attribute (.) Operator
    6. Type Conversion
    7. Unicode Strings
    8. Boolean Expressions and Truth Values
    9. Object Equality and Identity
    10. Order of Evaluation
11. Control Flow
    1. Conditionals
    2. Loops
    3. Exceptions
    4. Defining New Exceptions
    5. Assertions and _ _debug_ _
12. Functions and Functional Programming
    1. Functions
    2. Parameter Passing and Return Values
    3. Scoping Rules
    4. Recursion
    5. The apply() Function
    6. The lambda Operator
    7. map(), zip(), reduce(), and filter()
    8. List Comprehensions
    9. eval(), exec, execfile(), and compile()
13. Classes and Object-Oriented Programming
    1. The class statement
    2. Class Instances
    3. Reference Counting and Instance Destruction
    4. Inheritance
    5. Polymorphism
    6. Information Hiding
    7. Operator Overloading
    8. Classes, Types, and Membership Tests
14. Modules and Packages
    1. Modules
    2. The Module Search Path
    3. Module Loading and Compilation
    4. Module Reloading
    5. Packages
15. Input and Output
    1. Reading Options and Environment Variables
    2. Files
    3. Standard Input, Output, and Error
    4. The print Statement
    5. Persistence
    6. Unicode I/O
16. Execution Environment
    1. Interpreter Options and Environment
    2. Interactive Sessions
    3. Launching Python Applications
    4. Site Configuration Files
    5. Enabling Future Features
    6. Program Termination
17. The Python Library
    1. Built-in Functions and Exceptions
    2. Python Services
    3. Mathematics
    4. String Handling
    5. Data Management and Object Persistence
    6. Operating System Services
    7. Threads
    8. Network Programming
    9. Internet Data Handling and Encoding
    10. Restricted Execution
    11. Miscellaneous Modules
    12. The Python Debugger
    13. The Python Profiler
    14. Undocumented Modules
18. Extending and Embedding Python
    1. Enabling Optional Modules
    2. Compilation of Extensions
    3. Converting Data from Python to C
    4. Converting Data from C to Python
    5. Error Handling
    6. Reference Counting
    7. Calling Python from C
    8. Abstract Object Layer
    9. Low-Level Functions on Built-in Types
    10. Defining New Types
    11. Special Methods for Types
    12. Threads
    13. Embedding
    14. Extension Building Tools
19. Summary of Changes
    1. Python 1.6
    2. Python 2.0
    3. Python 2.1