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Python @ Web Programming
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Python Index - Python Book :
Python Essential Reference (2nd Edition)
by David M. Beazley Paperback: 416 pages Dimensions (in inches): 0.86 x 8.94 x 5.99 Publisher: New Riders Publishing ISBN: 0735710910; 2nd edition (June 7, 2001) For anyone who programs in Python, David M. Beazley's Python Essential Reference, Second Edition will serve as a capable and exceptionally competent guide to current Python syntax and library modules. Concise, yet authoritative, this book sets a high standard as a one-volume reference to this powerful object-oriented programming language. Although the author claims that this title is not really a tutorial, the first 100 pages actually provide an excellent guide to the basics of Python as a language. Geared especially to the experienced programmer seeking to see what's different (and potentially better) about Python, sections on the language itself will let you ramp up on the basic and advanced topics. Short sections with code excerpts that show off essential language features will help you learn or enhance your knowledge of Python quickly. Standout sections here include excellent coverage of object-oriented features, like "special methods" that will let you add custom classes to Python that are just as flexible as built-in classes. The heart of this book is the 250-page reference section. The author concentrates on all current Python modules (eschewing deprecated or obsolete APIs). Starting with basic modules for Python services and operating system functions, and including handling strings and math functions, the author explains and illustrates each module with short sample code, along with a full listing of APIs. Sections on Python's impressive support for virtually all networking protocols (including sockets, HTTP, FTP, and e-mail) are a standout and will arguably justify the cost of this title for many Python developers. Later modules look at undocumented functions, plus there's an in-depth guide to integrating Python and C code. (This material can even help you build custom Python modules.) With a remarkably clear presentation style, this well-organized reference offers a compact and worthy guide to today's Python that's sure to meet the needs of many working programmers. --Richard Dragan Python Essential Reference covered: • Reference (and expert-level tutorial) for Python 2.1 • Quick overview of Python essentials (including basic syntax, reserved words, and operators) • Types and objects (including built-in types, modules, classes, and special methods) • Operators and expressions (operations on numbers, sequences and dictionaries, type conversion, conditionals and loops) • Control flow • Functions and functional programming idioms • Classes and object-oriented programming tips • Modules and packages • Input and output (including files and persistence) • The Python execution environment • Python library reference • Python services (including garbage collection and "pickling") • Mathematical functions • Strings • Data management and object persistence • APIs Operating system services (including Mac OS and Windows-specific functions) • Python threads • Network programming (including HTTP, FTP, NNTP, and other Web protocols, socket programming, retrieving URLs) • Internet data handling and encoding (including mail attachment and MIME support) • Restricted execution and security modules • Undocumented modules • Extending and embedding Python and C • Summary of changes between Python 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1 From Library Journal: Though Python is a relatively new programming language, it has quite a significant audience owing to its sensible syntax. An active user of Python since 1996, Beazley provides ample information on the fundamentals of versions 2.0 and 2.1, including syntax, functions, operators, classes, and libraries. This is first and foremost a reference, so he avoids lengthy discussions of Python's superiority. Peppered with good code samples and featuring a companion web site with more extensive pieces, this title should be on hand in larger libraries. From Book News, Inc.: Written for programmers, this reference guide to the Python programming language covers the core language, some 100 modules in the standard library, and the techniques used to extend Python with procedures in C or C++. Coverage expands on and clarifies existing Python documentation, especially for advanced topics such as operating system interfaces, threads, network programming, and Unicode. Beazley is the developer of a software package for integrating C programs with interpreted languages.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR Jon Corbet, Linux Weekly News: Despite the increasingly high profile of the Python programming language, good books on the subject have been frustratingly scarce. The original Internet Programming With Python has been out of print for some time, and O'Reilly's offering has been felt by many to be not quite up to the level of that publisher's other books. So a new book about Python is certain to raise some degree of interest. Happily, the Python Essential Reference by David Beazley is a high quality work which should be well received by Python hackers everywhere. The Python Essential Reference is a marvel of conciseness. The tutorial introduction is dispensed with in ten pages, yet manages to touch on all the important features of the language. The next 75 pages go over the language in detail. Again, the treatment is very concise, but also complete. Your reviewer, who considers himself a reasonably experienced Python hacker, learned several things while reading those chapters. Book Description: Python Essential Reference, Second Edition, is the definitive guide to the Python programming language. Designed for programmers, it covers the core language, more than 100 modules in the standard library, and the techniques used to extend Python with compiled procedures in C or C++. Coverage expands upon and clarifies existing Python documentation - especially for advanced topics, including operating system interfaces, threads, network programming, and Unicode. Concise, to the point, and extensively indexed, readers will find this volume packed with information not previously available in any other single reference source. Updated for Python 2.1, it is a must-have for any serious programmer wanting to develop advanced Python applications. As a comprehensive reference to the Python programming language, this book will help you: - Learn about the features in Python 2.0 and 2. From the Publisher: David is a Python wiz! This well crafted book will bring you not only insightful information for your Python programming but also hidden pieces of fun. David is one of our top authors and a VOICE THAT MATTERS. Readers just love his work! He brings both passion and perfection to this work and it really shows through. If you're a Python programmer, you just simply can not be without this book. It's important to me that I hear what you think about this book. Please email me and share your comments at nrfeedback@newriders.com. From the Author: Python Essential Reference, Second Edition is the most comprehensive single source of reference material available for the Python programming language. Building on Python's online documentation, this book incorporates a wide variety of additional reference material and examples in order to provide detailed coverage of advanced Python topics. Newly updated and expanded for Python 2.1, this book provides complete coverage of the core language features, more than 120 modules in the standard library, and details of Python extension building. Concisely written, clearly organized, and extensively indexed, this book will be an indespensable resource for any serious Python programmer. From the Back Cover: Python Essential Reference, Second Edition, is the definitive guide to the Python programming language. Designed for programmers, it covers the core language, more than 100 modules in the standard library, and the techniques used to extend Python with compiled procedures in C or C++. Coverage expands upon and clarifies existing Python documentation - especially for advanced topics, including operating system interfaces, threads, network programming, and Unicode. Concise, to the point, and extensively indexed, readers will find this volume packed with information not previously available in any other single reference source. Updated for Python 2.1, it is a must-have for any serious programmer wanting to develop advanced Python applications. As a comprehensive reference to the Python programming language, this book will help you: • Learn about the features in Python 2.0 and 2.1 • Master the details of Python types, operators, and the execution model • Discover the details of Unicode and internationalization support • Learn the details of operating system interfaces, threads, and network-programming modules • Build C/C++ extensions to Python • Make effective use of the Python library • Find the information you need to start developing advanced Python applications About the Author: David M. Beazley is the developer of SWIG, a popular software package for integrating C programs with interpreted languages including Python, Perl, and Tcl. He has been actively involved with the Python community since 1996 and is currently working on projects related to mixed-mode debugging of scripting language extensions. Dave spent seven years working in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he helped pioneer the use of Python with high-performance simulation software running on parallel computers. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, where he enjoys tormenting students with insane programming projects in operating systems, networks, and compilers courses. He can be reached at beazley@cs.uchicago.edu. Excerpted from Python Essential Reference (OTHER NEW RIDERS) by David Beazley. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved: Foreword by Guido van Rossum. Excerpted from Python Essential Reference by David M. Beazley. As Python's creator, I'm really happy that this book has appeared. It marks a point in time when Python is becoming a mainstream language, with a rapidly growing community of users. If you consider yourself an (established or aspiring) member of this community, you need neither evangelizing nor proselytizing, and you already know Python well enough to have chosen it as an essential element of your personal toolbox. This book aims to be your guide on the rest of your journey through the Python world. It documents every detail of the language's syntax and semantics, provides reference documentation and examples for most standard library modules, and even contains a quick reference for writing extension modules. All this information is thoroughly indexed and cross-referenced, and where necessary contains pointers to additional online documentation for obscure details. You might think that all this information is already available for free on the Python Web site (www.python.org). Sure, it's all there[md]in fact, I'm certain that the author, my good friend David Beazley, consulted the Web site many times. He would have been a fool not to! However, with all due respect for the authors of Python's online documentation (myself included!), this book has a huge advantage over the Web site: you can easily take it with you on a trip into the desert. Seriously, David has reorganized and rewritten all the information for maximum clarity, pulled things together from different sources, removed redundancies, clarified ambiguities, added better examples, and so on. He also had a benefit that few readers of the Web site have: direct access to my brain! This summer, David spent a few weeks visiting CNRI, the research lab in Reston that Python calls home. During this time we had many interesting and fruitful discussions about Python, this book, the meaning of life, southwestern cooking, the joys and pains of teaching computer science to non-computer scientists, and the Spanish Inquisition. (Remember? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!) I hope that you will enjoy using this book, and that it will serve you well. I also hope that you will continue to enjoy using Python, and that it will serve you well. Python is a great programming language, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank the entire Python community for making Python what it is today. Without the thousands of believers, users, contributors, entrepreneurs and developers who make up the Python community, my own energy directed toward Python would have dried up long ago. I see this as the essence of open source projects: The energy and creativity of many people with diverse goals together can work miracles! Customer Reviews Reviewer: David Margrave from Bellevue, WA United States This is a great book. About 2/3 of the book covers the python library, but is more thorough and has more and better examples than the free online python library reference. One of python's strengths is that its standard 'out of the box' library is much more comprehensive than that "other" scripting language. The other 1/3 of the book contains a brief tutorial and comprehensive language reference. This is the python book that I use the most, and unless you want tons of very long examples like some of the other python books have, this is the only one you need. Reviewer: ericlw from San Francisco, CA USA The author did a great job of including a ton of information in a clear and succinct reference. This is not a book that will teach a newbie all about programming. However, it is perfect for those that have at least some programming experience, whether in Python or some other language, and need a reference while coding in Python. For those new to the language who find themselves wondering "How do I do that in Python?", the first chapter includes a short (11 page) tutorial that demonstrates using: - Variables - Conditionals - File I/O - Strings - Lists & Tuples - Loops - Dictionaries - Functions - Classes - Exceptions - Modules The tutorial section is nice while getting up to speed with Python's syntax. The rest of the book goes into a bit more detail on rest of the Python's language features with the exception of some of the more inconspicuous ones. Most of the "raw" information in the book is available on python.org or other online resources, but with the book you get that same information filtered through the author's Python experience plus a lot of concise examples. I've found that what is not covered in this book is better answered by searching the related mailing list archives. As with the other New Riders programming books I own, this one is indexed well, making it easy to find what I am looking for. Also, the size of the book is small enough that it fits nicely in my briefcase and on my desktop. It appears that a lot of thought went into both the content of the book as well as the overall design of the reference, that's why I've given it the highest rating. Reviewer: Nathan Yergler from Fort Wayne, IN United States This book is bad. And not just normal, mostly available online bad, but really bad. Is it technically correct? Yes. Does it cover the basics well? Yes. But to call itself an "essential" reference is going too far. My main complaints come from the fact that half the modules refer the reader to the online documentation. I don't mind the fact that it replicates the online docs -- there's something to be said for printed manuals. However for many modules the author simply duplicated the example and refers the reader to the website. This wouldn't be so bad if the examples were always self-documenting, but they're not. The second frustration with this book comes from it's unusability as a reference. This stems from the fact that the index and table of contents point to the wrong pages. Or simply pages that don't exist. I don't know if this happened during the transition to the second edition, but it's unexcusable. And it's not just a few -- it's a lot. In conclusion, this is not a book that will see much use in my office. In fact, I think I'm going to put it out of sight -- just looking at it annoys me. Reviewer: britpunk from San Francisco, CA United States I am an experienced programmer and I wanted to get up to speed quickly. Much of the information has been taken almost verbatim from the online docs. Language description is scant, for example the explanation of variable scoping rules left me with many unanswered questions. Much of the book is taken up with library descriptions . . not very exciting. Another thing . . the type size is tiny. |
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