The Quick Python Book, 3rd Edition

Summary

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.

Foreword by Nicholas Tollervey, Python Software Foundation.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

Initially Guido van Rossum’s 1989 holiday project, Python has grown into an amazing computer language. It’s a joy to learn and read, and powerful enough to handle everything from low-level system resources to advanced applications like deep learning. Elegantly simple and complete, it also boasts a massive ecosystem of libraries and frameworks. Python programmers are in high demand/mdash;you can’t afford not to be fluent!

About the Book

The Quick Python Book, Third Edition is a comprehensive guide to the Python language by a Python authority, Naomi Ceder. With the personal touch of a skilled teacher, she beautifully balances details of the language with the insights and advice you need to handle any task. Extensive, relevant examples and learn-by-doing exercises help you master each important concept the first time through. Whether you’re scraping websites or playing around with nested tuples, you’ll appreciate this book’s clarity, focus, and attention to detail.

What’s Inside

• Clear coverage of Python 3
• Core libraries, packages, and tools
• In-depth exercises
• Five new data science-related chapters

About the Reader

Written for readers familiar with programming concepts—no Python experience assumed.

About the Author

Naomi Ceder is chair of the Python Software Foundation. She has been learning, using, and teaching Python since 2001.

Table of Contents

Packt 1. Starting out
Chapter 1. About Python
Chapter 2. Getting started
Chapter 3. The Quick Python overview

Packt 2. The essentials
Chapter 4. The absolute basics
Chapter 5. Lists, tuples, and sets
Chapter 6. Strings
Chapter 7. Dictionaries
Chapter 8. Control flow
Chapter 9. Functions
Chapter 10. Modules and scoping rules
Chapter 11. Python programs
Chapter 12. Using the filesystem
Chapter 13. Reading and writing files
Chapter 14. Exceptions

Packt 3. Advanced language features
Chapter 15. Classes and objectoriented programming
Chapter 16. Regular expressions
Chapter 17. Data types as objects
Chapter 18. Packages
Chapter 19. Using Python libraries

Packt 4. Working with data
Chapter 20. Basic file wrangling
Chapter 21. Processing data files
Chapter 22. Data over the network
Chapter 23. Saving data
Chapter 24. Exploring data

Appendix A. A guide to Python’s documentation
AppendixB. Exercise answers