April 2017
Intermediate to advanced
769 pages
21h 56m
English
Content preview from Python in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
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Chapter 1. Introduction to Python
Python, a general-purpose programming language, has been around for quite a while: Guido van Rossum, Python’s creator, started developing Python back in 1990. This stable and mature language is very high-level, dynamic, object-oriented, and cross-platform—all very attractive characteristics. Python runs on all major hardware platforms and operating systems, so it doesn’t constrain your choices.
Python offers high productivity for all phases of the software life cycle: analysis, design, prototyping, coding, testing, debugging, tuning, documentation, deployment, and, of course, maintenance. Python’s popularity has seen steady, unflagging growth over the years. Today, familiarity with Python is an advantage for every programmer, as Python has infiltrated every niche and has useful roles to play as a part of any software solution.
Python provides a unique mix of elegance, simplicity, practicality, and sheer power. You’ll quickly become productive with Python, thanks to its consistency and regularity, its rich standard library, and the many third-party packages and tools that are readily available for it. Python is easy to learn, so it is quite suitable if you are new to programming, yet is also powerful enough for the most sophisticated expert.
The Python Language
The Python language, while not minimalist, is spare, for good pragmatic reasons. Once a language offers one good way to express a design idea, adding other ways has, at best, modest benefits, ...
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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.