The Quick Python Book, Third Edition
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This third revision of Manning's popular The Quick Python Book offers a clear, crisp updated introduction to the elegant Python programming language and its famously easy-to-read syntax. Written for programmers new to Python, this latest edition includes new exercises throughout. It covers features common to other languages concisely, while introducing Python's comprehensive standard functions library and unique features in detail.
After exploring Python's syntax, control flow, and basic data structures, the book shows how to create and deploy full applications and larger code libraries. It addresses established Python features as well as the advanced object-oriented options available in Python 3. Along the way, you'll survey the current Python development landscape, including Pythonic best practices, data extraction and cleaning, database access, and web frameworks.
Table of Contents detailed table of contents
Part 1: Starting out
1. About Python
1.1. Why should I use Python?
1.2. What Python does well
1.2.1. Python is easy to use
1.2.2. Python is expressive
1.2.3. Python is readable
1.2.4. Python is complete - "batteries included"
1.2.5. Python is cross-platform
1.2.6. Python is free
1.3. What Python doesn't do as well
1.3.1. Python is not the fastest language
1.3.2. Python doesn't have the most libraries
1.3.3. Python doesn't check variable types at compile time
1.3.4. Python doesn't have much mobile support
1.3.5. Python doesn't use multiple processors well
1.4. Why learn Python 3?
1.5. Summary
2. Getting started
2.1. Installing Python
2.2. IDLE and the basic interactive mode
2.2.1. The basic interactive mode
2.2.2. The IDLE integrated development environment
2.2.3. Choosing between basic interactive mode and IDLE
2.3. Using IDLE's Python Shell window
2.4. Hello, world
2.5. Using the interactive prompt to explore Python
2.6. Summary
3. The Quick Python overview
3.1. Python synopsis
3.2. Built-in data types
3.2.1. Numbers
3.2.2. Lists
3.2.3. Tuples
3.2.4. Strings
3.2.5. Dictionaries
3.2.6. Sets
3.2.7. File objects
3.3. Control flow structures
3.3.1. Boolean values and expressions
3.3.2. The if-elif-else statement
3.3.3. The while loop
3.3.4. The for loop
3.3.5. Function definition
3.3.6. Exceptions
3.3.7. Context handling using with
3.4. Module creation
3.5. Object-oriented programming
3.6. Summary
Part 2: The essentials
4. The absolute basics
4.1. Indentation and block structuring
4.2. Differentiating comments
4.3. Variables and assignments
4.4. Expressions
4.5. Strings
4.6. Numbers
4.6.1. Built-in numeric functions
4.6.2. Advanced numeric functions
4.6.3. Numeric computation
4.6.4. Complex numbers
4.6.5. Advanced complex-number functions
4.7. The None value
4.8. Getting input from the user
4.9. Built-in operators
4.10. Basic Python style
4.11. Summary
5. Lists, tuples, and sets
5.1. Lists are like arrays
5.2. List indices
5.3. Modifying lists
5.4. Sorting lists
5.4.1. Custom sorting
5.4.2. The sorted() function
5.5. Other common list operations
5.5.1. List membership with the in operator
5.5.2. List concatenation with the + operator
5.5.3. List initialization with the * operator
5.5.4. List minimum or maximum with min and max
5.5.5. List search with index
5.5.6. List matches with count
5.5.7. Summary of list operations
5.6. Nested lists and deep copies
5.7. Tuples
5.7.1. Tuple basics
5.7.2. One-element tuples need a comma
5.7.3. Packing and unpacking tuples
5.7.4. Converting between lists and tuples
5.8. Sets
5.8.1. Set operations
5.8.2. Frozensets
5.9. Summary
6. Strings
6.1. Strings as sequences of characters
6.2. Basic string operations
6.3. Special characters and escape sequences
6.3.1. Basic escape sequences
6.3.2. Numeric (octal and hexadecimal) and Unicode escape sequences
6.3.3. Printing vs. evaluating strings with special characters
6.4. String methods
6.4.1. The split and join string methods
6.4.2. Converting strings to numbers
6.4.3. Getting rid of extra whitespace
6.4.4. String searching
6.4.5. Modifying strings
6.4.6. Modifying strings with list manipulations
6.4.7. Useful methods and constants
6.5. Converting from objects to strings
6.6. Using the format method
6.6.1. The format method and positional parameters
6.6.2. The format method and named parameters
6.6.3. Format specifiers
6.7. Formatting strings with %
6.7.1. Using formatting sequences
6.7.2. Named parameters and formatting sequences
6.8. String Interpolation
6.9. Bytes
6.10. Summary
7. Dictionaries
7.1. What is a dictionary?
7.1.1. Why dictionaries are called dictionaries
7.2. Other dictionary operations
7.3. Word counting
7.4. What can be used as a key?
7.5. Sparse matrices
7.6. Dictionaries as caches
7.7. Efficiency of dictionaries
7.8. Summary
8. Control flow
8.1. The while loop
8.1.1. The break and continue statements
8.2. The if-elif-else statement
8.3. The for loop
8.3.1. The range function
8.3.2. Using break and continue in for loops
8.3.3. The for loop and tuple unpacking
8.3.4. The enumerate function
8.3.5. The zip function
8.4. List and dictionary comprehensions
8.4.1. Generator Expressions
8.5. Statements, blocks, and indentation
8.6. Boolean values and expressions
8.6.1. Most Python objects can be used as Booleans
8.6.2. Comparison and Boolean operators
8.7. Writing a simple program to analyze a text file
8.8. Summary
9. Functions
9.1. Basic function definitions
9.2. Function parameter options
9.2.1. Positional parameters
9.2.2. Passing arguments by parameter name
9.2.3. Variable numbers of arguments
9.2.4. Mixing argument-passing techniques
9.3. Mutable objects as arguments
9.4. Local, nonlocal, and global variables
9.5. Assigning functions to variables
9.6. lambda expressions
9.7. Generator functions
9.8. Decorators
9.9. Summary
10. Modules and scoping rules
10.1. What is a module?
10.2. A first module
10.3. The import statement
10.4. The module search path
10.4.1. Where to place your own modules
10.5. Private names in modules
10.6. Library and third-party modules
10.7. Python scoping rules and namespaces
10.8. Summary
11. Python programs
11.1. Creating a very basic program
11.1.1. Starting a script from a command line
11.1.2. Command-line arguments
11.1.3. Redirecting the input and output of a script
11.1.4. The argparse module
11.1.5. Using the fileinput module
11.2. Making a script directly executable on UNIX
11.3. Scripts on Mac OS X
11.4. Script execution options in Windows
11.4.1. Starting a script from a command window or PowerShell
11.4.2. Other Windows options
11.5. Programs and modules
11.6. Distributing Python applications
11.6.1. wheels
11.6.2. py2exe and py2app
11.6.3. Creating executable programs with freeze
11.7. Summary
12. Using the filesystem
12.1. os and os.path vs. pathlib
12.2. Paths and pathnames
12.2.1. Absolute and relative paths
12.2.2. The current working directory
12.2.3. Accessing directories with pathlib
12.2.4. Manipulating pathnames
12.2.5. Manipulating pathnames with pathlib
12.2.6. Useful constants and functions
12.3. Getting information about files
12.3.1. Getting information about files with scandir
12.4. More filesystem operations
12.4.1. More filesystem operations with pathlib
12.5. Processing all files in a directory subtree
12.6. Summary
13. Reading and writing files
14. Exceptions
Part 3: Advanced language features
15. Classes and object-oriented programming
16. Regular expressions
17. Data types as objects
18. Packages
19. Using Python libraries
Part 4: Data handling
20. Handling Files
21. Processing Data Files
22. Data over the Network
23. Databases
24. Manipulating Data
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