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Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language
- By Mark Summerfield
- Published Dec 16, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Developer's Library series.
- Copyright 2009
- Dimensions: 7 X 9
- Pages: 552
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-13-712929-7
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-712929-4
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Product Author Bios
Mark Summerfield, owner of Qtrac Ltd., is an independent trainer, consultant, technical editor, and writer specializing in Python, C++, Qt, and PyQt. His books include Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: The Definitive Guide to PyQt Programming (Addison-Wesley, 2008) and, cowritten with Jasmin Blanchette, C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (Addison-Wesley, 2006). As Trolltech’s documentation manager, Mark founded and edited Trolltech’s technical journal, Qt Quarterly.
Python 3 is the best version of the language yet: It is more powerful, convenient, consistent, and expressive than ever before. Now, leading Python programmer Mark Summerfield demonstrates how to write code that takes full advantage of Python 3’s features and idioms. The first book written from a completely “Python 3” viewpoint, Programming in Python 3 brings together all the knowledge you need to write any program, use any standard or third-party Python 3 library, and create new library modules of your own.
Summerfield draws on his many years of Python experience to share deep insights into Python 3 development you won’t find anywhere else. He begins by illuminating Python’s “beautiful heart”: the eight key elements of Python you need to write robust, high-performance programs. Building on these core elements, he introduces new topics designed to strengthen your practical expertise–one concept and hands-on example at a time. This book’s coverage includes
- Developing in Python using procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming paradigms
- Creating custom packages and modules
- Writing and reading binary, text, and XML files, including optional compression, random access, and text and XML parsing
- Leveraging advanced data types, collections, control structures, and functions
- Spreading program workloads across multiple processes and threads
- Programming SQL databases and key-value DBM files
- Utilizing Python’s regular expression mini-language and module
- Building usable, efficient, GUI-based applications
- Advanced programming techniques, including generators, function and class decorators, context managers, descriptors, abstract base classes, metaclasses, and more
Programming in Python 3serves as both tutorial and language reference, and it is accompanied by extensive downloadable example code–all of it tested with the final version of Python 3 on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
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45 of 48 people found the following review helpful
Excellent, By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language (Paperback)
I am new to Python and wanted to learn. Prior to purchasing this book, I was reading "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz. I was literally half way through that book and couldn't write even a simple script due to the way that book is structured. I would not recommend that book. I was frustrated and ordered this book due to its coverage of Python 3. I am pleased.This book takes an approach that gives the reader a quick overview of the language that is complete enough to start using Python by page 40! When the book mentions a topic that is covered elsewhere, there is a little box in the margin that tells the page that topic is covered - foward and backward. Great idea! That is very handy. I had a little task that I wanted to write a script to do and I was able to do that easily after finishing the quick intro. I am still reading the book and there is a lot of advanced information that I have not read yet. If the beginning of the book is any... Read more
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Not for me.., By R Foose "philognosist" (Quincy, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language (Paperback)
A previous reviewer mentioned his experience with Mark Lutz's book. I had a similar experience with Lutz's book too. Unfortunately, after what starts out with a very useful approach (one which should be widely used by other authors) of getting you up and running quickly, Summerfield's book falls into the same problems that Lutz's book had. Namely, it s very densely written, with no obvious separation in the text from what is the useful overall knowledge about a topic and what is the more arcane. I plodded through about the first third of the book, until I realized I was becoming confused about what I already knew about Python..so I quit. To be fair, the book is not intended as a tutorial so much as it is a reference. But I have to say, that it needs a major overhaul before it can be really useful in this context too. For example, more separation using white space, or sub heads, or something, should separate sections within a chapter, and separate examples and illustrations from...
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Fantastic Introduction for Experienced Programmers,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language (Paperback)
This book is clearly targeted at developers who are already experienced programmers in some other language, who wish to migrate their skills over to Python. The book goes through each of Python's language features piece by piece, in a no-nonsense, concise manner. The book is excellent at explaining how Python implements various programming paradigms and different approaches to the "Python way" of doing things. It doesn't "talk down" to you, or spend chapters and chapters going over basic demo programs. This allows the book to cover a lot of topics very thoroughly.For me, the book was an excellent read and a great way to dive in to Python, and I expect other programmers would have the same experience. However, the pace is probably a bit too brisk for people who are programming for the very first time. |
Online Sample Chapters
Regular Expressions in Python 3
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Rapid Introduction to Procedural Programming 7
Creating and Running Python Programs 7
Python’s “Beautiful Heart” 12
Examples 36
Summary 42
Exercises 44
Chapter 2:Data Types 47
Identifiers and Keywords 47
Integral Types 50
Floating-Point Types 54
Strings 61
Examples 88
Summary 95
Exercises 97
Chapter 3: Collection Data Types 99
Sequence Types 99
Set Types 112
Mapping Types 117
Iterating and Copying Collections 127
Examples 138
Summary 146
Exercises 147
Chapter 4: Control Structures and Functions 149
Control Structures 149
Exception Handling 153
Custom Functions 161
Example: make_html_skeleton.py 175
Summary 181
Exercise 182
Chapter 5: Modules 185
Modules and Packages 185
Overview of Python’s Standard Library 202
Summary 219
Exercise 220
Chapter 6: Object-Oriented Programming 223
The Object-Oriented Approach 224
Custom Classes 228
Custom Collection Classes 251
Summary 272
Exercises 274
Chapter 7: File Handling 277
Writing and Reading Binary Data 282
Writing and Parsing Text Files 294
Writing and Parsing XML Files 302
Random Access Binary Files 313
Summary 326
Exercises 327
Chapter 8: Advanced Programming Techniques 329
Further Procedural Programming 330
Further Object-Oriented Programming 353
Functional-Style Programming 384
Example: Valid.py 388
Summary 390
Exercises 392
Chapter 9: Processes and Threading 395
Delegating Work to Processes 396
Delegating Work to Threads 400
Summary 409
Exercises 410
Chapter 10: Networking 413
Creating a TCP Client 414
Creating a TCP Server 420
Summary 427
Exercises 427
Chapter 11: Database Programming 431
DBM Databases 432
SQL Databases 436
Summary 443
Exercise 444
Chapter 12: Regular Expressions 445
Python’s Regular Expression Language 446
The Regular Expression Module 455
Summary 464
Exercises 465
Chapter 13: Introduction to GUI Programming 467
Dialog-Style Programs 470
Main-Window-Style Programs 476
Summary 491
Exercises 491
Epilogue 493
Index 495
Sample Pages
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