To help orient you, this section provides a quick rundown of the content and goals of the major parts of this book. If you’re anxious to get to it, you should feel free to skip this section (or browse the table of contents instead). To some readers, though, a book this large probably merits a brief roadmap up front.
By design, each part covers a major functional area of the language, and each part is composed of chapters focusing on a specific topic or aspect of the part’s area. In addition, each chapter ends with quizzes and their answers, and each part ends with larger exercises, whose solutions show up in Appendix D.
Practice matters: I strongly recommend that readers work through the quizzes and exercises in this book, and work along with its examples in general if you can. In programming, there’s no substitute for practicing what you’ve read. Whether you do it with this book or a project of your own, actual coding is crucial if you want the ideas presented here to stick.
Overall, this book’s presentation is bottom-up because Python is too. The examples and topics grow more challenging as we move along. For instance, Python’s classes are largely just packages of functions that process built-in types. Once you’ve mastered built-in types and functions, classes become a relatively minor intellectual leap. Because each part builds on those preceding it this way, most readers will find a linear reading makes the most sense. Here’s a preview of the book’s main parts you’ll find along the way:
We begin with a general overview of Python that answers commonly asked initial questions—why people use the language, what it’s useful for, and so on. The first chapter introduces the major ideas underlying the technology to give you some background context. The rest of this part moves on to explore the ways that both Python and programmers run programs. The main goal here is to give you just enough information to be able to follow along with later examples and exercises.
Next, we begin our tour of the Python language, studying Python’s major built-in object types and what you can do with them in depth: numbers, lists, dictionaries, and so on. You can get a lot done with these tools alone, and they are at the heart of every Python script. This is the most substantial part of the book because we lay groundwork here for later chapters. We’ll also explore dynamic typing and its references—keys to using Python well—in this part.
The next part moves on to introduce Python’s statements—the code you type to create and process objects in Python. It also presents Python’s general syntax model. Although this part focuses on syntax, it also introduces some related tools (such as the PyDoc system), takes a first look at iteration concepts, and explores coding alternatives.
This part begins our look at Python’s higher-level program structure tools. Functions turn out to be a simple way to package code for reuse and avoid code redundancy. In this part, we will explore Python’s scoping rules, argument-passing techniques, the sometimes-notorious lambda, and more. We’ll also revisit iterators from a functional programming perspective, introduce user-defined generators, and learn how to time Python code to measure performance here.
Python modules let you organize statements and functions into larger components, and this part illustrates how to create, use, and reload modules. We’ll also look at some more advanced topics here, such as module packages, module reloading, package-relative imports, 3.3’s new namespace packages, and the __name__ variable.
Here, we explore Python’s object-oriented programming tool, the class—an optional but powerful way to structure code for customization and reuse, which almost naturally minimizes redundancy. As you’ll see, classes mostly reuse ideas we will have covered by this point in the book, and OOP in Python is mostly about looking up names in linked objects with a special first argument in functions. As you’ll also see, OOP is optional in Python, but most find Python’s OOP to be much simpler than others, and it can shave development time substantially, especially for long-term strategic project development.
We conclude the language fundamentals coverage in this text with a look at Python’s exception handling model and statements, plus a brief overview of development tools that will become more useful when you start writing larger programs (debugging and testing tools, for instance). Although exceptions are a fairly lightweight tool, this part appears after the discussion of classes because user-defined exceptions should now all be classes. We also cover some more advanced topics, such as context managers, here.
In the final part, we explore some advanced topics: Unicode and byte strings, managed attribute tools like properties and descriptors, function and class decorators, and metaclasses. These chapters are all optional reading, because not all programmers need to understand the subjects they address. On the other hand, readers who must process internationalized text or binary data, or are responsible for developing APIs for other programmers to use, should find something of interest in this part. The examples here are also larger than most of those in this book, and can serve as self-study material.
The book wraps up with a set of four appendixes that give platform-specific tips for installing and using Python on various computers; present the new Windows launcher that ships with Python 3.3; summarize changes in Python addressed by recent editions and give links to their coverage here; and provide solutions to the end-of-part exercises. Solutions to end-of-chapter quizzes appear in the chapters themselves.
See the table of contents for a finer-grained look at this book’s components.