Chapter 4. The Python Language

This chapter is a quick guide to the Python language. To learn Python from scratch, I suggest you start with Learning Python, by Mark Lutz and David Ascher (O'Reilly). If you already know other programming languages and just want to learn the specific differences of Python, this chapter is for you. However, I'm not trying to teach Python here, so we're going to cover a lot of ground at a pretty fast pace. I focus on teaching the rules, and only secondarily on pointing out best practices and recommended style; for a standard Python style guide, see http://python.org/doc/peps/pep-0008/.