Python in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference

by Alex Martelli, Anna Martelli Ravenscroft, Steve Holden, Paul McGuire

Overview

Python was recently ranked as today's most popular programming language on the TIOBE index, thanks to its broad applicability to design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and maintenance. With this updated fourth edition, you'll learn how to get the most out of Python, whether you're a professional programmer or someone who needs this language to solve problems in a particular field.

Carefully curated by recognized experts in Python, this new edition focuses on version 3.10, bringing this seminal work on the Python language fully up to date on five version releases, including preview coverage of upcoming 3.11 features.

This handy guide will help you:

• Learn how Python represents data and program as objects
• Understand the value and uses of type annotations
• Examine which language features appeared in which recent versions
• Discover how to use modern Python idiomatically
• Learn ways to structure Python projects appropriately
• Understand how to debug Python code

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781098113551
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/14/2023
Edition description:	4th ed.
Pages:	735
Sales rank:	1,042,764
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Alex Martelli has been programming for 40 years, mainly in Python for the recent half of that time. He wrote the first two editions of Python in a Nutshell, and co-authored the first two editions of the Python Cookbook and the third edition of Python in a Nutshell. He is a PSF Fellow and Core Committer, and won the 2002 Activators' Choice Award and the 2006 Frank Willison Memorial Award for contributions to the Python community. He is active on Stack Overflow and a frequent speaker at technical conferences. He's been living in Silicon Valley with his wife Anna for over 16 years, and working at Google throughout this time, currently as Senior Staff Engineer leading "long tail" tech support for Google Cloud.

Anna Martelli Ravenscroft is a PSF Fellow and winner of the 2013 Frank Willison Memorial Award for contributions to the Python community. She co-authored the second edition of the Python Cookbook and 3rd edition of Python in a Nutshell. She has been a technical reviewer for many Python books and is a regular speaker and track chair at technical conferences. Anna lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Alex, two dogs, one cat, and several chickens.

Passionate about programming and community, Steve Holden has worked with computers since 1967 and started using Python at version 1.4 in 1995. He has since written about Python, created instructor-led training, delivered it to an international audience built 40 hours of video training for "reluctant Python users." An Emeritus Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, Steve served as a director of the Foundation for eight years and as its chairman for three; he created PyCon, the Python community's international conference series and was presented with the Simon Willison Award for services to the Python community. He lives in Hastings, England and works as Technical Architect for the UK Department for International Trade, where he is responsible for the systems that maintain and regulate the trading environment.

Paul McGuire has been programming for 40+ years, in languages ranging from FORTRAN to Pascal, PL/I, COBOL, Smalltalk, Java, C/C++/C#, and Tcl, settling on Python as his language-of-choice in 2001. He is a PSF Fellow, and is the author and maintainer of the popular pyparsing module, as well as littletable and plusminus. Paul authored the O'Reilly Short Cut Getting Started with Pyparsing, and has written and edited articles for Python Magazine. He has also spoken at PyCon and at the Austin Python User's Group, and is active on StackOverflow. Paul now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and dog, and works for Indeed as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, helping people get jobs!

Table of Contents

Preface; How This Book Is Organized; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; How to Contact Us; Safari® Enabled; Acknowledgments; Getting Started with Python; Chapter 1: Introduction to Python; 1.1 The Python Language; 1.2 The Python Standard Library and Extension Modules; 1.3 Python Implementations; 1.4 Python Development and Versions; 1.5 Python Resources; Chapter 2: Installation; 2.1 Installing Python from Source Code; 2.2 Installing Python from Binaries; 2.3 Installing Jython; 2.4 Installing IronPython; Chapter 3: The Python Interpreter; 3.1 The python Program; 3.2 Python Development Environments; 3.3 Running Python Programs; 3.4 The jython Interpreter; 3.5 The IronPython Interpreter; Core Python Language and Built-ins; Chapter 4: The Python Language; 4.1 Lexical Structure; 4.2 Data Types; 4.3 Variables and Other References; 4.4 Expressions and Operators; 4.5 Numeric Operations; 4.6 Sequence Operations; 4.7 Set Operations; 4.8 Dictionary Operations; 4.9 The print Statement; 4.10 Control Flow Statements; 4.11 Functions; Chapter 5: Object-Oriented Python; 5.1 Classes and Instances; 5.2 Special Methods; 5.3 Decorators; 5.4 Metaclasses; Chapter 6: Exceptions; 6.1 The try Statement; 6.2 Exception Propagation; 6.3 The raise Statement; 6.4 Exception Objects; 6.5 Custom Exception Classes; 6.6 Error-Checking Strategies; Chapter 7: Modules; 7.1 Module Objects; 7.2 Module Loading; 7.3 Packages; 7.4 The Distribution Utilities (distutils); Chapter 8: Core Built-ins; 8.1 Built-in Types; 8.2 Built-in Functions; 8.3 The sys Module; 8.4 The copy Module; 8.5 The collections Module; 8.6 The functional Module; 8.7 The bisect Module; 8.8 The heapq Module; 8.9 The UserDict Module; 8.10 The optparse Module; 8.11 The itertools Module; Chapter 9: Strings and Regular Expressions; 9.1 Methods of String Objects; 9.2 The string Module; 9.3 String Formatting; 9.4 The pprint Module; 9.5 The repr Module; 9.6 Unicode; 9.7 Regular Expressions and the re Module; Python Library and Extension Modules; Chapter 10: File and Text Operations; 10.1 Other Chapters That Also Deal with Files; 10.2 Organization of This Chapter; 10.3 File Objects; 10.4 Auxiliary Modules for File I/O; 10.5 The StringIO and cStringIO Modules; 10.6 Compressed Files; 10.7 The os Module; 10.8 Filesystem Operations; 10.9 Text Input and Output; 10.10 Richer-Text I/O; 10.11 Interactive Command Sessions; 10.12 Internationalization; Chapter 11: Persistence and Databases; 11.1 Serialization; 11.2 DBM Modules; 11.3 Berkeley DB Interfacing; 11.4 The Python Database API (DBAPI) 2.0; Chapter 12: Time Operations; 12.1 The time Module; 12.2 The datetime Module; 12.3 The pytz Module; 12.4 The dateutil Module; 12.5 The sched Module; 12.6 The calendar Module; 12.7 The mx.DateTime Module; Chapter 13: Controlling Execution; 13.1 Dynamic Execution and the exec Statement; 13.2 Internal Types; 13.3 Garbage Collection; 13.4 Termination Functions; 13.5 Site and User Customization; Chapter 14: Threads and Processes; 14.1 Threads in Python; 14.2 The thread Module; 14.3 The Queue Module; 14.4 The threading Module; 14.5 Threaded Program Architecture; 14.6 Process Environment; 14.7 Running Other Programs; 14.8 The mmap Module; Chapter 15: Numeric Processing; 15.1 The math and cmath Modules; 15.2 The operator Module; 15.3 Random and Pseudorandom Numbers; 15.4 The decimal Module; 15.5 The gmpy Module; Chapter 16: Array Processing; 16.1 The array Module; 16.2 Extensions for Numeric Array Computation; 16.3 The Numeric Package; 16.4 Array Objects; 16.5 Universal Functions (ufuncs); 16.6 Auxiliary Numeric Modules; Chapter 17: Tkinter GUIs; 17.1 Tkinter Fundamentals; 17.2 Widget Fundamentals; 17.3 Commonly Used Simple Widgets; 17.4 Container Widgets; 17.5 Menus; 17.6 The Text Widget; 17.7 The Canvas Widget; 17.8 Layout Management; 17.9 Tkinter Events; Chapter 18: Testing, Debugging, and Optimizing; 18.1 Testing; 18.2 Debugging; 18.3 The warnings Module; 18.4 Optimization; Network and Web Programming; Chapter 19: Client-Side Network Protocol Modules; 19.1 URL Access; 19.2 Email Protocols; 19.3 The HTTP and FTP Protocols; 19.4 Network News; 19.5 Telnet; 19.6 Distributed Computing; 19.7 Other Protocols; Chapter 20: Sockets and Server-Side Network Protocol Modules; 20.1 The socket Module; 20.2 The SocketServer Module; 20.3 Event-Driven Socket Programs; Chapter 21: CGI Scripting and Alternatives; 21.1 CGI in Python; 21.2 Cookies; 21.3 Other Server-Side Approaches; Chapter 22: MIME and Network Encodings; 22.1 Encoding Binary Data as Text; 22.2 MIME and Email Format Handling; Chapter 23: Structured Text: HTML; 23.1 The sgmllib Module; 23.2 The htmllib Module; 23.3 The HTMLParser Module; 23.4 The BeautifulSoup Extension; 23.5 Generating HTML; Chapter 24: Structured Text: XML; 24.1 An Overview of XML Parsing; 24.2 Parsing XML with SAX; 24.3 Parsing XML with DOM; 24.4 Changing and Generating XML; Extending and Embedding; Chapter 25: Extending and Embedding Classic Python; 25.1 Extending Python with Python’s C API; 25.2 Extending Python Without Python’s C API; 25.3 Embedding Python; 25.4 Pyrex; Chapter 26: Extending and Embedding Jython; 26.1 Importing Java Packages in Jython; 26.2 Embedding Jython in Java; 26.3 Compiling Python into Java; Chapter 27: Distributing Extensions and Programs; 27.1 Python’s distutils; 27.2 py2exe; 27.3 py2app; 27.4 cx_Freeze; 27.5 PyInstaller; About the Author; Colophon;

Editorial Reviews

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Perhaps the best book about Python ever written, this is the perfect capstone to anyone's library of Pythonic books, and also the perfect introduction to Python for anyone well versed in other programming languages.