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,
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.
Python Development Environments
The Python interpreter’s built-in interactive mode is the simplest development environment for Python. It is a bit primitive, but it is lightweight, has a small footprint, and starts fast. Together with an appropriate text editor (as discussed in Free Text Editors with Python Support), and line-editing and history facilities, the interactive interpreter (or, alternatively, IPython) offers a usable and popular development environment. However, there are a number of other development environments that you can also use.
IDLE
Python’s Integrated DeveLopment Environment (IDLE) comes with the standard Python distribution. IDLE is a cross-platform, 100 percent pure Python application based on Tkinter (see Chapter 17). IDLE offers a Python shell similar to interactive Python interpreter sessions but richer in functionality. It also includes a text editor optimized to edit Python source code, an integrated interactive debugger, and several specialized browsers/viewers.
Other Free Cross-Platform Python IDEs
IDLE is mature, stable, easy to use, and fairly rich in functionality. Promising new Python IDEs that share IDLE’s free and cross-platform nature are emerging. Red Hat’s Source Navigator (http://sources.redhat.com/sourcenav/) supports many languages. It runs on Linux, Solaris, HPUX, and Windows. Boa Constructor (http://boa-constructor.sf.net/) is Python-only and still beta-level, but well worth trying out. Boa Constructor includes a GUI builder for the wxWindows ...
Become 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,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
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.