Organization


This book has 20 chapters. Each chapter is devoted to a particular kind of recipe, such as algorithms, text processing, databases, and so on. The 1st edition had 17 chapters. There have been improvements to Python, both language and library, and to the corpus of recipes the Python community has posted to the cookbook site, that convinced us to add three entirely new chapters: on the iterators and generators introduced in Python 2.3; on Python's support for time and money operations, both old and new; and on new, advanced tools introduced in Python 2.2 and following releases (custom descriptors, decorators, metaclasses). Each chapter contains an introduction, written by an expert in the field, followed by recipes selected from the online cookbook (in some casesabout 5% of this book's recipesa few new recipes were specially written for this volume) and edited to fit the book's formatting and style requirements. Alex (with some help from Anna) did the vast majority of the selectiondetermining which recipes from the first edition to keep and update, and selecting new recipes to add, or merge with others, from the nearly 1,000 available on the site (so, if a recipe you posted to the cookbook site didn't get into this printed edition, it's his fault!). He also decided which subjects just had to be covered and thus might need specially written recipesalthough he couldn't manage to get quite all of the specially written recipes he wanted, so anything that's missing, and wasn't on the cookbook site, might not be entirely his fault.

Once the selection was complete, the work turned to editing the recipes, and to merging multiple recipes, as well as incorporating important contents from many significant comments posted about the recipes. This proved to be quite a challenge, just as it had been for the first edition, but even more so. The recipes varied widely in their organization, level of completeness, and sophistication. With over 300 authors involved, over 300 different "voices" were included in the text. We have striven to maintain a variety of styles to reflect the true nature of this book, the book written by the entire Python community. However, we edited each recipe, sometimes quite considerably, to make it as accessible and useful as possible, ensuring enough uniformity in structure and presentation to maximize the usability of the book as a whole. Most recipes, both from the first edition and from the online site, had to be updated, sometimes heavily, to take advantage of new tools and better approaches developed since those recipes were originally posted. We also carefully reconsidered (and slightly altered) the ordering of chapters, and the placement and ordering of recipes within chapters; our goal in this reordering was to maximize the book's usefulness for both newcomers to Python and seasoned veterans, and, also, for both readers tackling the book sequentially, cover to cover, and ones just dipping in, in "random access" fashion, to look for help on some specific area.

While the book should thus definitely be accessible "by hops and jumps," we nevertheless believe a first sequential skim will amply repay the modest time you, the reader, invest in it. On such a skim, skip every recipe that you have trouble following or that is of no current interest to you. Despite the skipping, you'll still get a sense of how the whole book hangs together and of where certain subjects are covered, which will stand you in good stead both for later in-depth sequential reading, if that's your choice, and for "random access" reading. To further help you get a sense of what's where in the book, here's a capsule summary of each chapter's contents, and equally capsule bios of the Python experts who were so kind as to take on the task of writing the chapters' "Introduction" sections.


Chapter 1, introduction by Fred L. Drake, Jr.

This chapter contains recipes for manipulating text in a variety of ways, including combining, filtering, and formatting strings, substituting variables throughout a text document, and dealing with Unicode.

Fred Drake is a member of the PythonLabs group, working on Python development. A father of three, Fred is best known in the Python community for single-handedly maintaining the official documentation. Fred is a co-author of Python & XML (O'Reilly).


Chapter 2, introduction by Mark Lutz

This chapter presents techniques for working with data in files and for manipulating files and directories within the filesystem, including specific file formats and archive formats such as tar and zip.

Mark Lutz is well known to most Python users as the most prolific author of Python books, including Programming Python, Python Pocket Reference, and Learning Python (all from O'Reilly), which he co-authored with David Ascher. Mark is also a leading Python trainer, spreading the Python gospel throughout the world.


Chapter 3, introduction by Gustavo Niemeyer and Facundo Batista

This chapter (new in this edition) presents tools and techniques for working with dates, times, decimal numbers, and some other money-related issues.

Gustavo Niemeyer is the author of the third-party dateutil module, as well as a variety of other Python extensions and projects. Gustavo lives in Brazil. Facundo Batista is the author of the Decimal PEP 327, and of the standard library module decimal, which brought floating-point decimal support to Python 2.4. He lives in Argentina. The editors were delighted to bring them together for this introduction.


Chapter 4, introduction by David Ascher

This chapter includes recipes for many common techniques that can be used anywhere, or that don't really fit into any of the other, more specific recipe categories.

David Ascher is a co-editor of this volume. David's background spans physics, vision research, scientific visualization, computer graphics, a variety of programming languages, co-authoring Learning Python (O'Reilly), teaching Python, and these days, a slew of technical and nontechnical tasks such as managing the ActiveState team. David also gets roped into organizing Python conferences on a regular basis.


Chapter 5, introduction by Tim Peters

This chapter covers techniques for searching and sorting in Python. Many of the recipes explore creative uses of the stable and fast list.sort in conjunction with the decorate-sort-undecorate (DSU) idiom (newly built in with Python 2.4), while others demonstrate the power of heapq, bisect, and other Python searching and sorting tools.

Tim Peters, also known as the tim-bot, is one of the mythological figures of the Python world. He is the oracle, channeling Guido van Rossum when Guido is busy, channeling the IEEE-754 floating-point committee when anyone asks anything remotely relevant, and appearing conservative while pushing for a constant evolution in the language. Tim is a member of the PythonLabs team.


Chapter 6, introduction by Alex Martelli

This chapter offers a wide range of recipes that demonstrate the power of object-oriented programming with Python, including fundamental techniques such as delegating and controlling attribute access via special methods, intermediate ones such as the implementation of various design patterns, and some simple but useful applications of advanced concepts, such as custom metaclasses, which are covered in greater depth in Chapter 20.

Alex Martelli, also known as the martelli-bot, is a co-editor of this volume. After almost a decade with IBM Research, then a bit more than that with think3, inc., Alex now works as a freelance consultant, most recently for AB Strakt, a Swedish Python-centered firm. He also edits and writes Python articles and books, including Python in a Nutshell (O'Reilly) and, occasionally, research works on the game of contract bridge.


Chapter 7, introduction by Aaron Watters

This chapter presents Python techniques for persistence, including serialization approaches and interaction with various databases.

Aaron Watters was one of the earliest advocates of Python and is an expert in databases. He's known for having been the lead author on the first book on Python (Internet Programming with Python, M&T Books, now out of print), and he has authored many widely used Python extensions, such as kjBuckets and kwParsing. Aaron currently works as a freelance consultant.


Chapter 8, introduction by Mark Hammond

This chapter includes a collection of recipes that assist with the debugging and testing process, from customizing error logging and traceback information, to unit testing with custom modules, unittest and doctest.

Mark Hammond is best known for his work supporting Python on the Windows platform. With Greg Stein, he built an incredible library of modules interfacing Python to a wide variety of APIs, libraries, and component models such as COM. He is also an expert designer and builder of developer tools, most notably Pythonwin and Komodo. Finally, Mark is an expert at debugging even the most messy systemsduring Komodo development, for example, Mark was often called upon to debug problems that spanned three languages (Python, C++, JavaScript), multiple threads, and multiple processes. Mark is also co-author, with Andy Robinson, of Python Programming on Win32 (O'Reilly).


Chapter 9, introduction by Greg Wilson

This chapter covers a variety of techniques for concurrent programming, including threads, queues, and multiple processes.

Greg Wilson writes children's books, as well as books on parallel programming and data crunching. When he's not doing that, he's a contributing editor with Doctor Dobb's Journal, an adjunct professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a freelance software developer. Greg was the original driving force behind the Software Carpentry project, and he recently received a grant from the Python Software Foundation to develop Pythonic course material for computational scientists and engineers.


Chapter 10, introduction by Donn Cave

This chapter includes recipes for a number of common system administration tasks, from generating passwords and interacting with the Windows registry, to handling mailbox and web server issues.

Donn Cave is a software engineer at the University of Washington's central computer site. Over the years, Donn has proven to be a fount of information on comp.lang.python on all matters related to system calls, Unix, system administration, files, signals, and the like.


Chapter 11, introduction by Fredrik Lundh

This chapter contains recipes for common GUI tasks, mostly with Tkinter, but also a smattering of wxPython, Qt, image processing, and GUI recipes specific to Jython (for JVMJava Virtual Machine), Mac OS X, and IronPython (for dotNET).

Fredrik Lundh, also known as the eff-bot, is the CTO of Secret Labs AB, a Swedish Python-focused company providing a variety of products and technologies. Fredrik is the world's leading expert on Tkinter (the most popular GUI toolkit for Python), as well as the main author of the Python Imaging Library (PIL). He is also the author of Python Standard Library (O'Reilly), which is a good complement to this volume and focuses on the modules in the standard Python library. Finally, he is a prolific contributor to comp.lang.python, helping novices and experts alike.


Chapter 12, introduction by Paul Prescod

This chapter offers techniques for parsing, processing, and generating XML using a variety of Python tools.

Paul Prescod is an expert in three technologies: Python, which he need not justify; XML, which makes sense in a pragmatic world (Paul is co-author of the XML Handbook, with Charles Goldfarb, published by Prentice Hall); and Unicode, which somehow must address some deep-seated desire for pain and confusion that neither of the other two technologies satisfies. Paul is currently a product manager at Blast Radius.


Chapter 13, introduction by Guido van Rossum

This chapter covers a variety of network programming techniques, from writing basic TCP clients and servers to manipulating MIME messages.

Guido created Python, nurtured it throughout its infancy, and is shepherding its growth. Need we say more?


Chapter 14, introduction by Andy McKay

This chapter presents a variety of web-related recipes, including ones for CGI scripting, running a Java servlet with Jython, and accessing the content of web pages.

Andy McKay is the co-founder and vice president of Enfold Systems. In the last few years, Andy went from being a happy Perl user to a fanatical Python, Zope, and Plone expert. He wrote the Definitive Guide to Plone (Apress) and runs the popular Zope discussion site, http://www.zopezen.org.


Chapter 15, introduction by Jeremy Hylton

This chapter provides recipes for using Python in simple distributed systems, including XML-RPC, CORBA, and Twisted's Perspective Broker.

Jeremy Hylton works for Google. In addition to young twins, Jeremy's interests including programming language theory, parsers, and the like. As part of his work for CNRI, Jeremy worked on a variety of distributed systems.


Chapter 16, introduction by Paul F. Dubois

This chapter contains Python techniques that involve program introspection, currying, dynamic importing, distributing programs, lexing and parsing.

Paul Dubois has been working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for many years, building software systems for scientists working on everything from nuclear simulations to climate modeling. He has considerable experience with a wide range of scientific computing problems, as well as experience with language design and advanced object-oriented programming techniques.


Chapter 17, introduction by David Beazley

This chapter offers techniques for extending Python and recipes that assist in the development of extensions.

David Beazley's chief claim to fame is SWIG, an amazingly powerful hack that lets one quickly wrap C and other libraries and use them from Python, Tcl, Perl, and myriad other languages. Behind this seemingly language-neutral tool lies a Python supporter of the first order, as evidenced by his book, Python Essential Reference (New Riders). David Beazley is a fairly sick man (in a good way), leading us to believe that more scarily useful tools are likely to emerge from his brain. He's currently inflicting his sense of humor on computer science students at the University of Chicago.


Chapter 18, introduction by Tim Peters

This chapter provides a collection of fascinating and useful algorithms and data structures implemented in Python.

See the discussion of Chapter 5 for information about Tim Peters.


Chapter 19, introduction by Raymond Hettinger

This chapter (new in this edition) contains recipes demonstrating the variety and power of iterators and generatorshow Python makes your loops' structures simpler, faster, and reusable.

Raymond Hettinger is the creator of the itertools package, original proposer of generator expressions, and has become a major contributor to the development of Pythonif you don't know who originated and implemented some major novelty or important optimization in the 2.3 and 2.4 releases of Python, our advice is to bet it was Raymond!


Chapter 20, introduction by Raymond Hettinger

This chapter (new in this edition) provides an in-depth look into the infrastructural elements which make Python's OOP so powerful and smooth, and how you can exploit and customize them for fun and profit. From handy idioms for building properties, to aliasing and caching attributes, all the way to decorators which optimize your functions by hacking their bytecode and to a factory of custom metaclasses to solve metatype conflicts, this chapter shows how, while surely "there be dragons here," they're the wise, powerful and beneficent Chinese variety thereof...!

See the discussion of Chapter 19 for information about Raymond Hettinger.



Python Cookbook
Python Cookbook
ISBN: 0596007973
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 420

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