20 of the Best Free Python Books - Part 2

6. Building Skills in Python

This 47 chapter book will help you build Python programming skills through a series of exercises. It includes six projects from straightforward to sophisticated that will help solidify your Python skills.

This book is a close-to-complete presentation of the Python language, updated to cover Python 2.6 and some elements of Python 3.1. It is oriented toward learning, which involves accumulating many closely intertwined concepts. This book is primarily targeted at professional programmers.

The book explores a wide range of topics including:

• Numeric Expressions and Output
• Advanced Expressions
• Variables, Assignment and Input
• Truth, Comparison and Conditional Processing
• Loops and Iterative Procssing
• Functions

This book is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License.

7. Dive into Python

Dive Into Python is a hands-on guide to the Python language. Each chapter starts with a real, complete code sample, proceeds to pick it apart and explain the pieces, and then puts it all back together in a summary at the end.

Explores:

• Native Datatypes
• The Power of Introspection
• Objects and Object-Orientation
• Exceptions and File Handling
• Regular Expressions
• HTML Processing
• XML Processing
• Scripts and Streams
• HTTP Web Services
• SOAP Web Services
• Unit Testing
• Refactoring
• Functional Programming
• Dynamic Functions
• Performance Tuning

This book is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version.

8. Text Processing in Python

Text Processing in Python describes techniques for manipulation of text using the Python programming language. At the broadest level, text processing is simply taking textual information and doing something with it. This might be restructuring or reformatting it, extracting smaller bits of information from it, or performing calculations that depend on the text.

Text processing is arguably what most programmers spend most of their time doing. Because Python is clear, expressive, and object-oriented it is a perfect language for doing text processing, even better than Perl. As the amount of data everywhere continues to increase, this is more and more of a challenge for programmers.

This book is not a tutorial on Python. The author provides practical pointers and tips that emphasize efficent, flexible, and maintainable approaches to the text processing tasks that working programmers face daily.

Text Processing in Python begins with an introduction to text processing and contains a quick Python tutorial to get you up to speed. It then delves into essential text processing subject areas, including string operations, regular expressions, parsers and state machines, and Internet tools and techniques. Appendixes cover such important topics as data compression and Unicode.

This book is copyright to Addison Wesley but can be downloaded without charge.

9. The Standard Python Library

The Standard Python Library is a guide for serious Python programmers. It offers accurate, author-tested documentation of all the modules in the Python 2.0 Library, together with over 300 annotated example scripts using the modules.

The book has chapters on:

• Standard and Core Modules
• Threads and Processes
• Data Representation
• File Formats
• Mail and News Messages
• Network Protocols
• Internationalization
• Multimedia Modules
• Data Storage
• Tools and Utilities
• Platform Specific Modules
• Implementation Support Modules
• Other Modules

This is an electronic edition which is based on the second edition published by O'Reilly in 2001.

10. The Definitive Guide to Pylons

Pylons is a lightweight web framework built on standard Python tools that provides a robust environment for writing modern web applications. It is well known for its clean architecture and loosely coupled approach, both of which make web development fast, flexible, and easy.

The Definitive Guide to Pylons teaches you everything you need to know about web development with Pylons - from how to create your first "Hello World!" application to how to use each of Pylons’ core tools including FormEncode, Mako, SQLAlchemy, and Routes to how to perform more advanced tasks such as testing, using Unicode, internationalizing your application, authenticating users, and more.

It also helps developers make use of the software's built-in support for session management, web services, and Ajax.

This book is made available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version.