0.3 What You ll Need to Use This Book

0.3 What You'll Need to Use This Book

This book is ideally suited for programmers who are a little bit familiar with Python, and whose daily tasks involve a fair amount of text processing chores. Programmers who have some background in other programming languages especially with other "scripting" languages should be able to pick up enough Python to get going by reading Appendix A.

While Python is a rather simple language at heart, this book is not intended as a tutorial on Python for nonprogrammers. Instead, this book is about two other things: getting the job done, pragmatically and efficiently; and understanding why what works works and what doesn't work doesn't work, theoretically and conceptually. As such, we hope this book can be useful both to working programmers and to students of programming at a level just past the introductory.

Many sections of this book are accompanied by problems and exercises, and these in turn often pose questions for users. In most cases, the answers to the listed questions are somewhat open-ended there are no simple right answers. I believe that working through the provided questions will help both self-directed and instructor-guided learners; the questions can typically be answered at several levels and often have an underlying subtlety. Instructors who wish to use this text are encouraged to contact the author for assistance in structuring a curriculum involving it. All readers are encouraged to consult the book's Web site to see possible answers provided by both the author and other readers; additional related questions will be added to the Web site over time, along with other resources.

The Python language itself is conservative. Almost every Python script written ten years ago for Python 1.0 will run fine in Python 2.3+. However, as versions improve, a certain number of new features have been added. The most significant changes have matched the version number changes Python 2.0 introduced list comprehensions, augmented assignments, Unicode support, and a standard XML package. Many scripts written in the most natural and efficient manner using Python 2.0+ will not run without changes in earlier versions of Python.

The general target of this book will be users of Python 2.1+, but some 2.2+ specific features will be utilized in examples. Maybe half the examples in this book will run fine on Python 1.5.1+ (and slightly fewer on older versions), but examples will not necessarily indicate their requirement for Python 2.0+ (where it exists). On the other hand, new features introduced with Python 2.1 and above will only be utilized where they make a task significantly easier, or where the feature itself is being illustrated. In any case, examples requiring versions past Python 2.0 will usually indicate this explicitly.

In the case of modules and packages whether in the standard library or third-party we will explicitly indicate what Python version is required and, where relevant, which version added the module or package to the standard library. In some cases, it will be possible to use later standard library modules with earlier Python versions. In important cases, this possibility will be noted.



Text Processing in Python
Text Processing in Python
ISBN: 0321112547
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 59
Authors: David Mertz

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