Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language

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 3 serves 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.