Programming in Python 3 (Second Edition)
A Complete Introduction to the Python Language
by Mark Summerfield

ISBN-10: 0321680561 – ISBN-13: 978-0321680563
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 focuses exclusively on Python 3 to avoid the risk of confusion with earlier versions. However, existing Python 2 programmers might find my highly condensed Moving from Python 2 to Python 3 document (4 pages, PDF, 676K) to be a helpful companion.

The book is 648 pages, and is published by Addison-Wesley Professional. Previews are available from Safari, and the Introduction, all of Chapter 13 (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 Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.co.jp, and other online and local book stores. Only the printed editions are definitive—although available in electronic formats, "ebooks" usually restrict your rights, and they are often retypeset which can introduce errors.

This second edition has been fully revised and updated to cover both Python 3.0 and Python 3.1, and extended with new chapters on debugging, testing, and profiling, and on parsing (with coverage of the third party PyParsing and PLY modules), as well as a new section on coroutines in the Advanced chapter.

The source code is available in two formats, py3book30.tar.gz (292K suitable for any platform), and py3book30.zip (402K Windows line endings) [updated 2010-08-27]—all the examples and code snippets work with Python 3.0 and 3.1. If you don't care about Python 3.0-compatibility (after all, Python 3.1 is now the "standard", at least for a few years, in view of the language moratorium), then you might prefer the Python 3.1 versions of the examples: py3book31.tar.gz (292K suitable for any platform), and py3book31.zip (402K Windows line endings) [updated 2010-08-27]. There is also an Errata [updated 2010-08-27].

The book is now available in several translations.

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.)
    • Further Procedural Programming
    • Further Object-Oriented Programming
    • Functional-Style Programming
  • Chapter 9. Debugging, Testing, and Profiling
    • Debugging
    • Unit Testing
    • Profiling
  • Chapter 10. Processes and Threading
    • Using the Multiprocessing Module
    • Using the Threading Module
  • Chapter 11. Networking
    • Creating a TCP Client
    • Creating a TCP Server
  • Chapter 12. Database Programming
    • DBM Databases
    • SQL Databases
  • Chapter 13. 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 Regular Expression Module
  • Chapter 14. Introduction to Parsing
    • BNF Syntax and Parsing Terminology
    • Writing Handcrafted Parsers
    • Pythonic Parsing with PyParsing
    • Lex/Yacc-Style Parsing with PLY
  • Chapter 15. Introduction to GUI Programming
    • Dialog-Style Programs
    • Main Window-Style Programs
  • Epilogue
  • Selected Bibliograpy
  • Index

 Programming in Python 3 book cover

Reviews (for the First Edition)

The examples and errata for the first edition are still available: Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language (First Edition).

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.
Copyright © 2006-10 Qtrac Ltd. All Rights Reserved.