Building Skills in Python¶

How do you learn Python? By doing a series of exercises, each of which adds a single new feature of the language. This 450+ page book has 42 chapters that will help you build Python programming skills through a series of exercises. This book includes six projects from straight-forward to sophisticated that will help solidify your Python skills.

The 2.6 edition was significantly revised and expanded to cover Python 2.6 and some elements of Python 3.1.

The current release has benefitted from a great deal of support from readers who sent detailed lists of errors and suggestions.

Professional programmers who need to learn Python are this book’s primary audience. We provide specific help for you in a number of ways.

Since Python is simple, we can address newbie programmers who don’t have deep experience in a number of other languages. We will call out some details in specific newbie sections. Experienced programmers can skip these sections.
Since Python has a large number of sophisticated built-in data structures, we address these separately and fully. An understanding of these structures can simplify complex programs.
The object-orientation of Python provides tremendous flexibility and power. This is a deep subject, and we will provide an introduction to object-oriented programming in this book. More advanced design techniques are addressed in Building Skills in Object-Oriented Design.
The accompanying libraries make it inexpensive to develop complex and complete solutions with minimal effort. This, however, requires some time to understand the packaged components that are available, and how they can be integrated to create useful software. We cover some of the most important modules to specifically prevent programmers from reinventing the wheel with each project.

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