This chapter wrapped up the exceptions part of the book with a survey of design concepts, a look at common exception use cases, and a brief summary of commonly used development tools.

This chapter also wrapped up the core material of this book. At this point, you’ve been exposed to the full subset of Python that most programmers use—and probably more. In fact, if you have read this far, you should feel free to consider yourself an official Python programmer. Be sure to pick up a t-shirt or laptop sticker the next time you’re online (and don’t forget to add Python to your résumé the next time you dig it out).

The next and final part of this book is a collection of chapters dealing with topics that are advanced, but still in the core language category. These chapters are all optional reading, or at least deferrable reading, because not every Python programmer must delve into their subjects, and others can postpone these chapters’ topics until they are needed. Indeed, many of you can stop here and begin exploring Python’s roles in your application domains. Frankly, application libraries tend to be more important in practice than advanced—and to some, esoteric—language features.

On the other hand, if you do need to care about things like Unicode or binary data, have to deal with API-building tools such as descriptors, decorators, and metaclasses, or just want to dig a bit further in general, the next part of the book will help you get started. The larger examples in the final part will also give you a chance to see the concepts you’ve already learned being applied in more realistic ways.

As this is the end of the core material of this book, though, you get a break on the chapter quiz—just one question this time. As always, be sure to work through this part’s closing exercises to cement what you’ve learned in the past few chapters; because the next part is optional reading, this is the final end-of-part exercises session. If you want to see some examples of how what you’ve learned comes together in real scripts drawn from common applications, be sure to check out the “solution” to exercise 4 in Appendix D.

And if this is the end of your journey in this book, be sure to also see the “Bonus” section at the end of Chapter 41, the very last chapter in this book (for the sake of readers continuing on to the Advanced Topics part, I won’t spill the beans here).