Every so often a book comes along that makes you ask yourself, “Gee, when was the last time I had my eyes checked?” David M. Beazley’s Python: Essential Reference is just such a book. Condensing thousands of pages of Python online documentation into a compact 319-page softcover, Beazley and his editors used the old-college trick (often performed in reverse) of dickering with the font size to meet a putative page-limit requirement. The result is a truly condensed product fit for the occularly well-adjusted (nota bene).
Beazley’s subject is Python, a full-featured, freely-redistributable, POSIX-compliant (platforms include Linux, Unix, Macintosh, and Windows) scripting language that is based on object-oriented design principles. As advertised, Beazley’s source release (1.5.2) is available from an unfortunately slow server at www.python.org. The installation under Linux (Redhat 5.2) proceeded without incident. (more…)
Portable, powerful, and a breeze to use, Python is ideal for both standalone programs and scripting applications. With this hands-on book, you can master the fundamentals of the core Python language quickly and efficiently, whether you're new to programming or just new to Python. Once you finish, you will know enough about the language to use it in any application domain you choose. Learning Python is based on material from author Mark Lutz's popular training courses, which he's taught over the past decade. Each chapter is a self-contained lesson that helps you thoroughly understand a key component of Python before you continue. Along with plenty of annotated examples, illustrations, and chapter summaries, every chapter also contains Brain Builder, a unique section with practical exercises and review quizzes that let you practice new skills and test your understanding as you go. This book covers: Types and Operations — Python's major built-in object types in depth: numbers, lists, dictionaries, and more Statements and Syntax — the code you type to create and process objects in Python, along with Python's general syntax model Functions — Python's basic procedural tool for structuring and reusing code Modules — packages of statements, functions, and other tools organized into larger components Classes and OOP — Python's optional object-oriented programming tool for structuring code for customization and reuse Exceptions and Tools — exception handling model and statements, plus a look at development tools for writing larger programs Learning Python gives you a deep and complete understanding of the language that will help you comprehend any application-level examples of Python that you later encounter. If you're ready to discover what Google and YouTube see in Python, this book is the best way to get started.
This book teaches Plone development best practices, focusing on Plone 3.0. It covers setting up a development environment, customizing Plone's look and feel, creating new content types and forms, connecting to external databases, managing users and groups intelligently, configuring a production-ready server, LDAP authentication, and caching. Aimed at developers wanting to leverage the proven user interface and flexible infrastructure of this open-source Content Management System, it takes a pragmatic approach, building a realistic example application whose code is included with the book. Built on the Zope application server and written in Python, Plone makes it easy for content authors to create and edit web content, and is also used by developers as a framework to build content-centric web applications like dynamic websites and intranets. Readers need familiarity with Python and basic web technologies such as HTML and CSS, and would also benefit from prior Zope/ Plone experience. 
Whether you're building GUI prototypes or full-fledged cross-platform GUI applications with native look-and-feel, PyQt 4 is your fastest, easiest, most powerful solution. Qt expert Mark Summerfield has written the definitive best-practice guide to PyQt 4 development.
* Django and Turbogears are the two leading MVC frameworks for Python programmers today; MVC frameworks allow programmers to develop and launch Web sites in a fraction of the time required by traditional techniques .
* This tutorial offers readers a thorough introduction to programming in Python 2.4, the portable, interpreted, object-oriented programming language that combines power with clear syntax
The Complete Developer's Guide to Python—Fully Updated for Python 2.5
Django, the Python-based equivalent to the Ruby on Rails web development framework, is presently one of the hottest topics in web development today. In The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right, Adrian Holovaty, one of Django's creators, and Django lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss show you how they use this framework to create award-winning web sites. Over the course of three parts, they guide you through the creation of a web application reminiscent of chicagocrime.org.
