Python Essential Reference (Developer’s Library) 4th Edition by David M Beazley (PDF)

Description

Python Essential Reference is the definitive reference guide to the Python programming language — the one authoritative handbook that reliably untangles and explains both the core Python language and the most essential parts of the Python library. Designed for the professional programmer, the book is concise, to the point, and highly accessible. It also includes detailed information on the Python library and many advanced subjects that is not available in either the official Python documentation or any other single reference source. Thoroughly updated to reflect the significant new programming language features and library modules that have been introduced in Python 2.6 and Python 3, the fourth edition of Python Essential Reference is the definitive guide for programmers who need to modernize existing Python code or who are planning an eventual migration to Python 3. Programmers starting a new Python project will find detailed coverage of contemporary Python programming idioms. This fourth edition of Python Essential Reference features numerous improvements, additions, and updates:Coverage of new language features, libraries, and modulesPractical coverage of Python’s more advanced features including generators, coroutines, closures, metaclasses, and decoratorsExpanded coverage of library modules related to concurrent programming including threads, subprocesses, and the new multiprocessing moduleUp-to-the-minute coverage of how to use Python 2.6’s forward compatibility mode to evaluate code for Python 3 compatibilityImproved organization for even faster answers and better usabilityUpdates to reflect modern Python programming style and idioms Updated and improved example codeDeep coverage of low-level system and networking library modules — including options not covered in the standard documentation

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐David Beazley’s “Python Essential Reference, Fourth Edition” covers Python 2.6 and 3.0, and is thus quite (though not completely) up to date. The author has in essence chosen to present the intersection of the two branches, i.e. omit features of Python 2 that have been removed from Python 3. This volume’s pace is rapid and the coverage is quite extensive, so this probably shouldn’t be the first Python book one reads.The Good: this book is approximately 700 pages long; even so, it’s not that bulky and is therefore quite manageable. It is split into two parts: 200 pages on the language and roughly 400 pages on the library. The first part is very good, while the second part is unrivaled as of this writing (though this may change when Doug Hellmann’s “The Python Standard Library by Example” comes out). Thus, the reader essentially gets two books for the price of one: the part on the language can be read linearly, while the library part can be read in chunks as the need arises. The book also includes an extremely useful Index which is approximately 80 pages long (and also contains unexpected entries, e.g. “chicken, multithreaded, 414”). Moving on to the material covered: Beazley includes an appendix on Python 3-specific concepts, but also offers useful advice on Python 3 throughout the main text (e.g. “To keep your brain from exploding, encoded byte strings and unencoded strings should never be mixed together in expressions”). I particularly enjoyed the sections on decorators, generators, and coroutines in the chapter on functional programming. Beazley has also posted on his website two tutorials on these topics that nicely complement the material in the book. Similarly, the chapter on multiprocessing and threading is impressive, and forms a nice set with the author’s talk slides on the Global Interpreter Lock — it’s important to note that Beazley used to be a professor of Computer Science. Probably the most significant aspect of this book is the abundance of examples. I’m pretty sure the phrase that is most often repeated in this volume is “Here’s an example”. The examples are always enlightening, sometimes clever, but never obfuscating. Finally, the writing may not be flawless but overall it is quite good. Of course, any reference text is bound to be somewhat dry, but within the confines of the genre Beazley has truly done wonders: he has a personality and he’s not afraid to show it. This jovial aspect of the writing is present when giving advice (e.g “Try not to mix threads and multiprocessing together in the same program unless you’re vastly trying to improve your job security”, p. 435), or just for its own sake (e.g. “If you change the code to only poll after every six-pack of beer”, p. 469)The Bad: chapter 1 is fun to read but it is deceptively titled (“A Tutorial Introduction”). For example, Beazley uses a decorator and the seek file method, without explaining anything about either of them. Of course, this book isn’t supposed to be introductory, so strictly speaking my quibble is with the first chapter’s title, not its content. The biggest problem I encountered while reading the book was the page layout in the majority of Part II: a module is introduced and then its methods are described by showing a name in bold, followed by a description on a separate line. This confused me to no end: whenever I saw a name, for a split second I would wonder if I should look up or down to find the description. This could have been avoided if the more standard tabular form had been chosen more often: name on one column, description on the other. Of course, I understand that this would have increased the size of the book considerably, perhaps prohibitively so. Moving on to more detailed complaints: for some modules (e.g. struct, shutil, os.path) Beazley gives a listing of the contents but, unfortunately, no corresponding examples. To be fair, he does use os.path functionality in a number of places throughout the book (though the index is no help tracking them down), just not in the appropriate section. Delving into even more detail: any book of this breadth is bound to contain minor errors. Here’s a selection of such slips, all drawn from the same chapter: in some cases the prose is obscure, e.g. “A method is a function that performs some sort of operation on an object when the method is invoked as a function.” (p. 33); sometimes a statement is contradicted in a later chapter, e.g. we read on p. 39 that “Sequences represent ordered sets of objects indexed by non-negative integers and include strings, lists, and tuples.” only to find out on p. 68 that “Negative indices can be used to fetch characters from the end of a sequence.”; similarly, on p. 45 we read that for dictionary methods like keys() “in Python 3 the result is an iterator that iterates over the current contents of the mapping”, while on p. 632 we learn that “these methods return so-called view objects”.These days, the aspiring intermediate Python programmer doesn’t have too many books to choose from: Martelli/Ravenscroft/Ascher’s “Python Cookbook” is out of date, Ziade’s “Expert Python Programming” contains too much material that is not Python-specific, and Alchin’s “Pro Python” is only ~ 250 pages long. Thus, for the time being Beazley’s “Python Essential Reference” is the obvious choice for a second book on Python. All in all, four and a half stars.Alex Gezerlis

⭐DISCLAIMER: I have, thus far, only read Part I (the first 199 pages). I may update this review, once I’ve read Parts II and IIII bought this book about 6 months into learning Python. I had gone through many Python resources, including a 2-day intro course, followed by:codecademy.com/tracks/pythonpython-course.eu/and about 20 different videos on pyvideo.org, my favorite being Hettinger’s ‘Class Development Toolkit’ (watch it. it is awesome.)Eventually, I got stuck. I didn’t know what else to learn, or in what order to learn it.Fortunately, this book includes a wide variety of topics, most of them presented in a sensible order. Beazley’s coverage of each topic is quite terse. For me, this was mostly good. I didn’t waste time reading through things I already knew, and when I wanted to learn more about a topic, I consulted Google and Stack Overflow. Despite the succinct descriptions, the book spans over 700 pages due to its breadth. I would hate to imagine how large a book it might be otherwise.That said, I would not recommend this as an introductory text (at least not for a beginning programmer). It isn’t intended to be. Beazley describes this as “a concise reference to the Python Programming language” and says that while “an experienced programmer will probably be able to learn Python from the book, it is not intended to be an extended tutorial or treatise on how to program”.Of course, I used it as a bit of a tutorial, but your mileage may vary.The vast majority of Beazley’s descriptions are quite good. Unfortunately, I found the introductions to Abstract Base Classes and Metaclasses to be too short, with both difficult subjects covered in a mere 5 pages. He comes back to these subjects much later in the book (I haven’t yet read those sections), but I would have preferred either a longer introduction, or no introduction at all. Reading this section, I had no idea what metaclasses were used for. I don’t have trouble with brevity elsewhere, but metaclasses are notoriously confusing.Despite that minor quibble, I found this book a tremendous resource, worthy of 5 stars. I have recently started on the Python Cookbook, which I am also enjoying thoroughly.Structure:Part I: The Python Language (199 pages) will give you a thorough introduction to Python/the standard library. I would call it a beginning and intermediate level course.Part II (the Python Library) is 390 pagesPart III (Extending and Embedding) is 32 pages.Part II covers a diverse collection of subjects (see the index), from math to testing to web programming. I expect to pick and choose from these; I see no reason to read them in order.Note: According to the O’Reilly site, you can get the ebook version for only $5 more if you own the physical version. It is supposedly kindle-compatible. And non-DRM!I STRONGLY recommend getting the physical version and, if you need the ebook, paying the $5 at the O’Reilly site.The code is very hard to read in the ebook version (maybe it would work on the Kindle DX? it was terrible on the regular kindle). I ultimately decided I couldn’t deal with it, and had to buy a physical copy. So, I bought the same book twice. Oh well.Who knows; O’Reilly’s ebook may be better than Amazon’s. It comes in multiple (kindle compatible) formats. It would be hard to be worse.

⭐Probably like many people, I’ve been using Python for text-processing, using tools like Pandas, or just as an adjunct to writing shell scripts.There are no shortage of texts , even those written for languages like R, which can be used/translated in an ad-hoc fashion.However, this is the one book “about” Python that I’m glad exists and that I’m glad to have at my side, as I start to think about more tasks I can (or perhaps should) be performing in Python rather than biting my tongue and wishing such-and-such a tool had an API for C.Yeah, I was hesitant, because what do I care about Python 2.x in this day and age? However, I find it important to understand a bit of the reasons for the shift to 3.x — this isn’t a theoretical text, but it’s possible to read between the lines and see some logic, and I find it helps me understand better, even though I’m unlikely to even see any Python 2.6 code unless by accident.I actually appreciate that’s it’s a smaller size than some of its counterparts in the Developer’s Library. For those for whom the print may be a bit too small, I sympathize (my eyes aren’t getting any younger either), consider it a trade-off between valuable texts like Prata’s C (or C++) Primer Plus and the sheer bulk of those texts. I think it’s a good balance.I don’t know if it’s suitable for a complete beginner to any kind of programming, but I wouldn’t discount it as such: there may well be absolute beginners who can and perhaps should dive right in to a real text, without any hocum-pocum toy programs or insulting exercises.Anyway, it’s the best book about a specific language I’ve bought in the past year, and I’m looking forward to doing more serious work in Python as I discover more.

⭐So bad, I ended up throwing it away and just relying on Stack Overflow.

⭐I have recently bought two Python books: “Core Python Programming” by Wesley Chun, and this one. I like this one better. It’s stunningly crisp, clear, and to the point. As the author says in the introduction “it has been my goal to produce a reference containing everything I have needed to use Python and its large collection of modules” and that’s exactly what he does.If you’re coming to Python as a programmer with experience in other languages you’ll find this book very accessible (it has a HUGE index). If you’re entirely new to programming it’s probably not for you.It was published in 2009 and inevitably is (slightly) showing signs of age, particularly in the comments about the status of Python 3. But I really, really wouldn’t let that put you off buying it. Mr. Beazley, you did a good job!

⭐out of date

⭐Its not only a reference book, I used this book for learning python from scratch. I dont use python that often at work but I use it a lot for writing custom scripts for my personal development.A must have book for any developer.

⭐Python Essential Reference is a brilliant read for both the casual career coder to the disciplined developer. A must have for anyone that likes to read around a subject and see just how far the rabbit hole really goes.I’ve been working with python for a few years now and every time I dip into this book I come away with something new to try with one of my projects.I now look forward to a bit of downtime just to flick through this great tome.

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