Programming in Python 3 (First Edition)

This book has been superceded by Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language (Second Edition).

This book teaches you how to write programs using Python 3, the most up to date, powerful and flexible version of Python yet released. Python 3 introduces many new idioms compared with Python 2 that make programming with it easier and at the same time helps produce clearer and more maintainable code. Python 3 is a superb very high level language, that is very easy to learn and use even by relatively inexperienced programmers. And once learned, Python 3 does not impose limits or restrictions, instead offering incredibly powerful and advanced facilities for those who want to learn and use them. Python  runs on Windows and most Unix-like operating systems such as Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux.

The book will be useful to people who program professionally as part of their job, whether as full-time software developers, or those from other disciplines, including scientists and engineers, who need to do some programming in support of their work. It will also prove ideal for those Python 2 programmers who need to migrate (or prepare to migrate) to Python 3. The book is also suitable for students—the only prerequisite is some basic knowledge of programming in any language, for example, Basic, Java, or JavaScript, or of course Python itself.

The book is ~500 pages (540 with forematter, index, etc.), and is published by Addison-Wesley Professional. Previews are available from Safari, and the Introduction, first few pages of Chapter 1, all of Chapter 12 (Regular Expressions), and the index is available from InformIT (click the Sample Content tab and then the Download the sample pages link.).
The book can be bought from other online and local book stores.

Only the English printed editions are definitive—although available in electronic formats, "ebooks" usually restrict your rights, and they are often retypeset which can introduce errors. Translations are arranged by the publisher and their quality can vary considerably.

Downloads

In view of the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act and an abundance of caution, we have withdrawn all our free software, including our book examples.

Table of Contents—the chapters also have exercises and summaries

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Rapid Introduction to Procedural Programming
  • Creating and Executing Python Programs
  • Python's "Beautiful Heart"
• Chapter 2. Data Types
  • Identifiers and Keywords
  • Integral Types
  • Floating-Point Types
  • Strings
• Chapter 3. Collection Data Types
  • Sequence Types
  • Set Types
  • Mapping Types
  • Iterating and Copying Collections
• Chapter 4. Control Structures and Functions
  • Control Structures
  • Exception Handling
  • Custom Functions
• Chapter 5. Modules
  • Modules and Packages
  • Overview of Python's Standard Library
• Chapter 6. Object-Oriented Programming
  • The Object-Oriented Approach
  • Custom Classes
  • Custom Collection Classes
• Chapter 7. File Handling
  • Writing and Reading Binary Data
  • Writing and Parsing Text Files
  • Writing and Parsing XML Files
  • Random Access Binary Files
• Chapter 8. Advanced Programming Techniques (One example from this chapter inspired my Python Descriptors article. A slightly enlarged version of the whole chapter entitled Advanced Python 3 Programming Techniques can be bought separately in its own right.)
  • Further Procedural Programming
  • Further Object-Oriented Programming
  • Functional-Style Programming
• Chapter 9. Processes and Threading
  • Delegating Work to Processes
  • Delegating Work to Threads
• Chapter 10. Networking
  • Creating a TCP Client
  • Creating a TCP Server
• Chapter 11. Database Programming
  • DBM Databases
  • SQL Databases
• Chapter 12. Regular Expressions (This chapter can be downloaded from InformIT—click the Sample Content tab and then the Download the sample pages link.)
  • Python's Regular Expression Language
  • The re Module
• Chapter 13. Introduction to GUI Programming
  • Dialog-Style Programs
  • Main Window-Style Programs
• Epilogue
• Index

Reviews

• Review by Phil Brooke (University of Teesside) (the review begins about halfway down the page)
• Review by James Pyles
• A Podcast about Python that includes a brief review of the book by Ron Stephens

For more information on Python 3 see the Python website.

Like all my books and most of my other writings, this book was written using The Lout Typesetting System.

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