Audience

We expect that you know at least some Python. This book does not attempt to teach Python as a whole; rather, it presents some specific techniques and concepts (and occasionally tricks) for dealing with particular tasks. If you are looking for an introduction to Python, consider some of the books described in the Further Reading section of this Preface. However, you don't need to know a lot of Python to find this book helpful. Chapters include recipes demonstrating the best techniques for accomplishing some elementary and general tasks, as well as more complex or specialized ones. We have also added sidebars, here and there, to clarify certain concepts which are used in the book and which you may have heard of, but which might still be unclear to you. However, this is definitely not a book just for beginners. The main target audience is the whole Python community, mostly made up of pretty good programmers, neither newbies nor wizards. And if you do already know a lot about Python, you may be in for a pleasant surprise! We've included recipes that explore some the newest and least well-known areas of Python. You might very well learn a few thingswe did! Regardless of where you fall along the spectrum of Python expertise, and more generally of programming skill, we believe you will get something valuable from this book.

If you already own the first edition, you may be wondering whether you need this second edition, too. We think the answer is "yes." The first edition had 245 recipes; we kept 146 of those (with lots of editing in almost all cases), and added 192 new ones, for a total of 338 recipes in this second edition. So, over half of the recipes in this edition are completely new, and all the recipes are updated to apply to today's Pythonreleases 2.3 and 2.4. Indeed, this update is the main factor which lets us have almost 100 more recipes in a book of about the same size. The first edition covered all versions from 1.5.2 (and sometimes earlier) to 2.2; this one focuses firmly on 2.3 and 2.4. Thanks to the greater power of today's Python, and, even more, thanks to the fact that this edition avoids the "historical" treatises about how you had to do things in Python versions released 5 or more years ago, we were able to provide substantially more currently relevant recipes and information in roughly the same amount of space.