Preface

The Python programming language manages to reconcile many apparent contradictions: it's both elegant and pragmatic, simple and powerful, a high-level language that doesn't get in your way when you want to fiddle with bits and bytes, suitable for programming novices and great for experts too.

This book is aimed at programmers with some previous exposure to Python, as well as experienced programmers coming to Python for the first time from other programming languages. The book is a quick reference to Python itself, the most important parts of its vast standard library, and some of the most popular and useful third-party modules, covering a range of applications including web and network programming, GUIs, XML handling, database interactions, and high-speed numeric computing. It focuses on Python's cross-platform capabilities and covers the basics of extending Python and embedding it in other applications, using either C or Java.