Title page	2
	Copyright Page	3
	Contents at a Glance	5
	Table of Contents	6
	Foreword	14
	About the Author	16
	About the Technical Reviewer	17
	Acknowledgments	18
	Installing Python	19
	Which Python Is Right for You?	19
	Installing on Microsoft Windows	20
	Installing on Mac OS X	29
	Installing on Ubuntu Linux	41
	Installing on Other Platforms	48
	Using the Python Shell	48
	Python Editors and IDEs	50
	CHAPTER 1 Your First Python Program	52
	Declaring Functions	53
	Optional and Named Arguments	54
	Writing Readable Code	56
	Documentation Strings	56
	The import Search Path	57
	Everything Is an Object	58
	What’s an Object?	59
	Indenting Code	59
	Exceptions	60
	Catching Import Errors	62
	Unbound Variables	63
	Running Scripts	63
	Further Reading Online	64
	CHAPTER 2 Native Datatypes	65
	Booleans	65
	Numbers	66
	Coercing Integers to Floats and Vice Versa	67
	Common Numerical Operations	68
	Fractions	69
	Trigonometry	70
	Numbers in a Boolean Context	70
	Lists	71
	Creating a List	71
	Slicing a List	72
	Adding Items to a List	73
	Searching For Values in a List	75
	Removing Items from a List	76
	Removing Items from a List: Bonus Round	76
	Lists in a Boolean Context	77
	Tuples	78
	Tuples in a Boolean Context	80
	Assigning Multiple Values at Once	80
	Sets	81
	Modifying a Set	83
	Removing Items from a Set	84
	Common Set Operations	85
	Sets in a Boolean Context	87
	Dictionaries	88
	Creating a Dictionary	88
	Modifying a Dictionary	88
	Mixed-Value Dictionaries	89
	Dictionaries in a Boolean Context	90
	None	91
	None in a Boolean Context	91
	Further Reading Online	92
	CHAPTER 3 Comprehensions	93
	Working With Files and Directories	93
	The Current Working Directory	93
	Working with Filenames and Directory Names	94
	Listing Directories	96
	Getting File Metadata	97
	Constructing Absolute Pathnames	97
	List Comprehensions	98
	Dictionary Comprehensions	100
	Fun with Dictionary Comprehensions	101
	Set Comprehensions	101
	Further Reading Online	102
	CHAPTER 4 Strings	103
	Unicode	104
	Diving In	106
	Formatting Strings	106
	Compound Field Names	107
	Format Specifiers	109
	Other Common String Methods	110
	Slicing a String	111
	Strings versus Bytes	112
	Character Encoding of Python Source Code	115
	Further Reading Online	116
	CHAPTER 5 Regular Expressions	118
	Case Study: Street Addresses	118
	Case Study: Roman Numerals	120
	Checking for Thousands	121
	Checking for Hundreds	122
	Using the {n,m} Syntax	124
	Checking for Tens and Ones	125
	Verbose Regular Expressions	127
	Case Study: Parsing Phone Numbers	129
	Further Reading Online	134
	CHAPTER 6 Closures and Generators	135
	I Know, Let’s Use Regular Expressions!	136
	A List of Functions	138
	A List of Patterns	140
	A File of Patterns	143
	Generators	144
	A Fibonacci Generator	146
	A Plural Rule Generator	147
	Further Reading Online	148
	CHAPTER 7 Classes and Iterators	149
	Defining Classes	150
	The __init__() Method	150
	Instantiating Classes	151
	Instance Variables	152
	A Fibonacci Iterator	153
	A Plural Rule Iterator	155
	Further Reading Online	160
	CHAPTER 8 Advanced Iterators	161
	Finding All Occurrences of a Pattern	163
	Finding the Unique Items in a Sequence	163
	Making Assertions	165
	Generator Expressions	165
	Calculating Permutations … the Lazy Way	167
	Other Fun Stuff in the itertools Module	168
	A New Kind of String Manipulation	172
	Evaluating Arbitrary Strings as Python Expressions	174
	Putting It All Together	178
	Further Reading Online	178
	CHAPTER 9 Unit Testing	179
	A Single Question	180
	Halt and Catch Fire	186
	More Halting, More Fire	189
	And One More Thing …	192
	A Pleasing Symmetry	194
	More Bad Input	198
	CHAPTER 10 Refactoring	202
	Handling Changing Requirements	205
	Refactoring	209
	Further Reading Online	213
	CHAPTER 11 Files	214
	Reading from Text Files	214
	Character Encoding Rears Its Ugly Head	215
	Stream Objects	216
	Reading Data from a Text File	217
	Closing Files	219
	Closing Files Automatically	220
	Reading Data One Line at a Time	220
	Writing to Text Files	222
	Character Encoding Again	223
	Binary Files	224
	Streams Objects from Nonfile Sources	225
	Handling Compressed Files	226
	Standard Input, Output, and Error	227
	Redirecting Standard Output	228
	Further Reading Online	231
	CHAPTER 12 XML	232
	A 5-Minute Crash Course in XML	233
	The Structure of an Atom Feed	236
	Parsing XML	238
	Elements Are Lists	239
	Attributes Are Dictionaries	240
	Searching for Nodes Within an XML Document	241
	Going Further with lxml	244
	Generating XML	246
	Parsing Broken XML	249
	Further Reading Online	251
	CHAPTER 13 Serializing Python Objects	252
	A Quick Note About the Examples in this Chapter	252
	Saving Data to a Pickle File	253
	Loading Data from a Pickle File	255
	Pickling Without a File	256
	Bytes and Strings Rear Their Ugly Heads Again	257
	Debugging Pickle Files	257
	Serializing Python Objects to be Read by Other Languages	260
	Saving Data to a JSON File	260
	Mapping Python Datatypes to JSON	262
	Serializing Datatypes Unsupported by JSON	262
	Loading Data from a JSON File	267
	Further Reading Online	269
	CHAPTER 14 HTTP Web Services	271
	Features of HTTP	272
	Caching	272
	Last-Modified Checking	273
	ETags	274
	Compression	275
	Redirects	275
	How Not to Fetch Data Over HTTP	276
	What’s On the Wire?	277
	Introducing httplib2	280
	Caching with httplib2	283
	Handling Last-Modified and ETag Headers with httplib2	286
	Handling Compression with httplib2	288
	Handling Redirects with httplib2	289
	Beyond HTTP GET	292
	Beyond HTTP POST	296
	Further Reading Online	298
	CHAPTER 15 Case Study: Porting chardet to Python 3	299
	What Is Character Encoding Auto-Detection?	299
	Why Auto-Detection Is Difficult	299
	Auto-Encoding Algorithms	300
	Introducing the chardet Module	300
	UTF-n with a BOM	300
	Escaped Encodings	300
	Multibyte Encodings	301
	Single-Byte Encodings	301
	windows-1252	302
	Running 2to3	302
	A Short Digression Into Multi-File Modules	305
	Fixing What 2to3 Can’t	307
	False Is Invalid Syntax	307
	No Module Named Constants	308
	Name 'file' Is Not Defined	309
	Can’t Use a String Pattern on a Bytes-Like Object	310
	Can’t Convert 'bytes' Object to str Implicitly	312
	Unsupported Operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'bytes'	315
	ord() Expected String of Length 1, but int Found	316
	Unorderable Types: int() >= str()	319
	Global Name 'reduce' Is not Defined	321
	Lessons Learned	323
	CHAPTER 16 Packaging Python Libraries	324
	Things Distutils Can’t Do for You	325
	Directory Structure	326
	Writing Your Setup Script	327
	Classifying Your Package	329
	Examples of Good Package Classifiers	329
	Checking Your Setup Script for Errors	332
	Creating a Source Distribution	332
	Creating a Graphical Installer	334
	Building Installable Packages for Other Operating Systems	335
	Adding Your Software to the Python Package Index	336
	The Many Possible Futures of Python Packaging	337
	Further Reading Online	338
	APPENDIX A Porting Code to Python 3 with 2to3	339
	print Statement	339
	Unicode String Literals	340
	unicode() Global Function	340
	long Datatype	341
	<> Comparison	341
	has_key() Dictionary Method	342
	Dictionary Methods that Return Lists	343
	Renamed or Reorganized Modules	343
	http	344
	urllib	344
	dbm	345
	xmlrpc	346
	Other Modules	346
	Relative Imports Within a Package	348
	next() Iterator Method	349
	filter() Global Function	350
	map() Global Function	350
	reduce() Global Function	351
	apply() Global Function	352
	intern() Global Function	352
	exec Statement	353
	execfile Statement	353
	repr Literals (Backticks)	354
	try...except Statement	354
	raise Statement	356
	throw Method on Generators	356
	xrange() Global Function	357
	raw_input() and input() Global Functions	358
	func_* Function Attributes	358
	xreadlines() I/O Method	359
	lambda Functions that Take a Tuple Instead of Multiple Parameters	360
	Special Method Attributes	361
	__nonzero__ Special Method	361
	Octal Literals	362
	sys.maxint	362
	callable() Global Function	363
	zip() Global Function	363
	StandardError Exception	363
	types Module Constants	364
	isinstance() Global Function	365
	basestring Datatype	365
	itertools Module	366
	sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value, sys.exc_traceback	366
	List Comprehensions Over Tuples	367
	os.getcwdu() Function	367
	Metaclasses	367
	Matters of Style	368
	set() Literals (Explicit)	368
	buffer() Global Function (Explicit)	368
	Whitespace Around Commas (Explicit)	369
	Common Idioms (Explicit)	369
	APPENDIX B Special Method Names	371
	Basics	371
	Classes that Act Like Iterators	372
	Computed Attributes	372
	Classes that Act Like Functions	375
	Classes that Act Like Sequences	376
	Classes that Act Like Dictionaries	378
	Classes that Act Like Numbers	379
	Classes that Can Be Compared	383
	Classes that Can Be Serialized	384
	Classes that Can Be Used in a “with” Block	384
	Really Esoteric Stuff	386
	Further Reading Online	387
	APPENDIX C Where to Go From Here	388
	Index	390