Python; Essential Reference

• Authors: David Beazley;Guido Van Rossum
• Venue: Python; Essential Reference
• Year: 1999

From the Book: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-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 weeksvisiting 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 noncomputer 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! -Guido van Rossum Baltimore, MD 9/13/1999