Programming Python, 3rd Edition

1.1. "And Now for Something Completely Different" This book is about using Python, an easy-to-use, flexible, object-oriented, mature, popular, and open source[*] programming language designed to optimize development speed. Although it is completel...

1.2. Python Philosophy 101 In the Preface, I mentioned that Python emphasizes concepts such as quality, productivity, portability, and integration. Since these four terms summarize most of the reasons for using Python, I'...

1.3. The Life of Python Python was invented around 1990 by Guido van Rossum, when he was at CWI in Amsterdam. It is named after the BBC comedy series Monty Python 's Flying Circus, of which Guido is a fan (see this chapter's sid...

1.4. Signs of the Python Times It's been an exciting decade in the Python world. Since I wrote the first edition of this book in 1995 and 1996, Python has grown from a new kid on the scripting-languages block to an est...

1.5. The Compulsory Features List One way to describe a language is by listing its features. Of course, this will be more meaningful after you've seen Python in action; the best I can do now is speak in the abstract. And it's really how Pytho...

1.6. What's Python Good For? Because Python is used in a wide variety of ways, it's almost impossible to give an authoritative answer to this question. As a general-purpose language, Python can be used for almost anyth...

1.7. What's Python Not Good For? To be fair again, some tasks are outside of Python's scope. Like all dynamic interpreted languages, Python, as currently implemented, isn't generally as fast or efficient as static, compiled languages such as C (se...

1.8. Truth in Advertising In this book's conclusionafter we've had a chance to study Python in actionwe will return to some of the bigger ideas introduced in this chapter. I want to point out up front, though, that my background is in computer sci...