July 2006
Beginner to intermediate
734 pages
20h 6m
English
Content preview from Python in a Nutshell, 2nd 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,
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Python Development and Versions
Python is developed, maintained, and released by a team of core developers headed by Guido van Rossum, Python’s inventor, architect, and Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL). This title means that Guido has the final say on what becomes part of the Python language and standard libraries. Python’s intellectual property is vested in the Python Software Foundation (PSF), a nonprofit corporation devoted to promoting Python, with dozens of individual members (nominated for their contributions to Python, and including all of the Python core team) and corporate sponsors. Most PSF members have commit privileges to Python’s SVN repositories (http://svn.python.org/projects/), and most Python SVN committers are members of the PSF.
Proposed changes to Python are detailed in public documents called Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs), debated (and sometimes advisorily voted on) by Python developers and the wider Python community, and finally approved or rejected by Guido, who takes debates and votes into account but is not bound by them. Many hundreds of people actively contribute to Python development through PEPs, discussion, bug reports, and proposed patches to Python sources, libraries, and documentation.
The Python core team releases minor versions of Python (2.x, for growing values of x), currently at a pace of about once every year or two. Python 2.2 was released in December 2001, 2.3 in July 2003, and 2.4 in November 2004. Python 2.5 is scheduled to be released ...
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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.