A Fully Revised Edition Featuring New Material on Coroutines, Debugging, Testing, Parsing, String Formatting, and More   Python 3 is the best version of the language yet: It is more powerful, convenient, consistent, and expressive than ever before. Now, leading Python programmer Mark Summerfield demonstrates how to write code that takes full advantage of Python 3’s features and idioms. Programming in Python 3, Second Edition, brings together all the knowledge you need to write any program, use any standard or third-party Python 3 library, and create new library modules of your own.   Summerfield draws on his many years of Python experience to share deep insights into Python 3 development you won’t find anywhere else. He begins by illuminating Python’s “beautiful heart”: the eight key elements of Python you need to write robust, high-performance programs. Building on these core elements, he introduces new topics designed to strengthen your practical expertise–one concept and hands-on example at a time. Coverage includes Developing in Python using procedural, objectoriented, and functional programming paradigms Creating custom packages and modules Writing and reading binary, text, and XML files, including optional compression, random access, and text and XML parsing Leveraging advanced data types, collections, control structures, and functions Spreading program workloads across multiple processes and threads Programming SQL databases and key—value DBM files Debugging techniques–and using Test Driven Development to avoid bugs in the first place Utilizing Python’s regular expression mini-language and module Parsing techniques, including how to use the third-party PyParsing and PLY modules Building usable, efficient, GUI-based applications Advanced programming techniques, including generators, function and class decorators, context managers, descriptors, abstract base classes, metaclasses, coroutines, and more   Programming in Python 3, Second Edition, serves as both tutorial and language reference. It assumes some prior programming experience, and it is accompanied by extensive downloadable example code–all of it tested with Python 3 on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Table of Contents:
List of Tables xv   Introduction 1   Chapter 1: Rapid Introduction to Procedural Programming 9 Creating and Running Python Programs 9 Python’s “Beautiful Heart” 14 Examples 39 Summary 44 Exercises 47   Chapter 2: Data Types 51 Identifiers and Keywords 51 Integral Types 54 Floating-Point Types 58 Strings 65 Examples 94 Summary 102 Exercises 104   Chapter 3: Collection Data Types 107 Sequence Types 107 Set Types 120 Mapping Types 126 Iterating and Copying Collections 138 Examples 148 Summary 156 Exercises 158   Chapter 4: Control Structures and Functions 159 Control Structures 159 Exception Handling 163 Custom Functions 171 Example: make_html_skeleton.py 185 Summary 191 Exercise 192   Chapter 5: Modules 195 Modules and Packages 195 Overview of Python’s Standard Library 212 Summary 230 Exercise 231   Chapter 6: Object-Oriented Programming 233 The Object-Oriented Approach 234 Custom Classes 238 Custom Collection Classes 261 Summary 283 Exercises 285   Chapter 7: File Handling 287 Writing and Reading Binary Data 292 Writing and Parsing Text Files 305 Writing and Parsing XML Files 312 Random Access Binary Files 324 Summary 336 Exercises 337   Chapter 8: Advanced Programming Techniques 339 Further Procedural Programming 340 Further Object-Oriented Programming 363 Functional-Style Programming 395 Example: Valid.py 407 Summary 410 Exercises 411   Chapter 9: Debugging, Testing, and Profiling 413 Debugging 414 Unit Testing 425 Profiling 432 Summary 437   Chapter 10: Processes and Threading 439 Using the Multiprocessing Module 440 Using the Threading Module 444 Summary 454 Exercises 455   Chapter 11: Networking 457 Creating a TCP Client 458 Creating a TCP Server 464 Summary 471 Exercises 471   Chapter 12: Database Programming 475 DBM Databases 476 SQL Databases 480 Summary 487 Exercise 488   Chapter 13: Regular Expressions 489 Python’s Regular Expression Language 490 The Regular Expression Module 499 Summary 509 Exercises 510   Chapter 14: Introduction to Parsing 513 BNF Syntax and Parsing Terminology 514 Writing Handcrafted Parsers 519 Pythonic Parsing with PyParsing 534 Lex/Yacc-Style Parsing with PLY 553 Summary 566 Exercise 568   Chapter 15: Introduction to GUI Programming 569 Dialog-Style Programs 572 Main-Window-Style Programs 578 Summary 593 Exercises 593   Epilogue 595 Selected Bibliography 597 Index 599