Alessandro Molina - Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

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First published: August 2018

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ISBN 978-1-78883-082-9

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Contributors

About the author

Alessandro Molina has been a Python developer since 2001, and has always been interested in Python as a web development platform. He has worked as a CTO and a team leader of Python teams for the past 10 years and is currently the core developer of the TurboGears2 web framework and maintainer of Beaker Caching/Session framework. He authored the DEPOT file storage framework and the DukPy JavaScript interpreter for Python and has collaborated with various Python projects related to web development, such as FormEncode, ToscaWidgets, and the Ming MongoDB ORM.

To Stefania for constantly supporting me through the late nights and pushing me to write one paragraph when I felt like slacking, without her continuous support I would have never finished this book.

To the Python community, for being such a great and positive environment where discussions can flourish within respect for each other and to all Python conferences organizers for giving us a great chance to discuss our ideas with other great developers in front of a cold beer.

About the reviewer

Simone Marzola is a software engineer and technical lead with 10 years of experience. He is passionate about Python and machine learning, which lead him to be an active contributor in open source communities such as Mozilla Services and Pylons Project, and involved in European conferences as a speaker. Simone has been a lecturer on the Big Dive data science and machine learning course. He is currently a CTO and Scrum Master at Oval Money.

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Preface

Python is a very powerful and widespread language, with a fully-featured standard library. It's said to come with batteries included, which means that most of what you will have to do will be available in the standard library.

Such a big set of functions might make developers feel lost, and it's not always clear which of the available tools are the best for solving a specific task. For many of these tasks, external libraries will also be available that you can install to solve the same problem. So, you might not only find yourself wondering which class or function to use from all the features provided by the standard library, but you will also wonder when it's best to switch to an external library to achieve your goals.

This book tries to provide a general overview of the tools available in the Python standard library to solve many common tasks and recipes to leverage those tools to achieve specific results. For cases where the solution based on the standard library might get too complex or limited, it will also try to suggest tools out of the standard library that can help you do the next step.

Who this book is for

This book is well suited for developers who want to write expressive, highly responsive, manageable, scalable, and resilient code in Python. Prior programming knowledge of Python is expected.

What this book covers

, Containers and Data Structures, covers less obvious cases of data structures and containers provided by the standard library. While more basic containers such as list and dict are taken for granted, the chapter will dive into less common containers and more advanced usages of the built-in containers.

, Text Management, covers text manipulation, string comparison, matching, and the most common needs when formatting output for text-based software.

, Command Line