Conventions Used in This Book

Pronouns: the first person singular is meant to convey that the recipe's or chapter introduction's author is speaking (when multiple credits are given for a recipe, the author is the first person credited); however, even such remarks have at times had to be edited enough that they may not reflect the original author's intended meaning (we, the editors, tried hard to avoid that, but we know we must have failed in some cases, since there were so many remarks, and authorial intent was often not entirely clear). The second person is meant to refer to you, the reader. The first person plural collectively indicates you, the reader, plus the recipe's author and co-authors, the editors, and my friend Joe (hi Joe!)in other words, it's a very inclusive "we" or "us."

Code: each block of code may indicate a complete module or script (or, often, a Python source file that is usable both as a script and as a module), an isolated snippet from some hypothetical module or script, or part of a Python interactive interpreter session (indicated by the prompt >>>).

The following typographical conventions are used throughout this book:

Italic for commands, filenames, for emphasis, and for first use of a term.

Constant width for general code fragments and keywords (mostly Python ones, but also other languages, such as C or HTML, where they occur). Constant width is also used for all names defined in Python's library and third-party modules.

Constant width bold is used to emphasize particular lines within code listings and show output that is produced.