Python Essential Reference, 4th Edition (Developer's Library)

The key feature of this edition of the reference guide, is the presence of both Python 2.6 and 3.0. If you're savvy enough to be reading a review about a Python reference text, you know that Python 3.0 breaks backwards compatibility. This is a big deal in terms of how Beazley chose to update his book. To quote, "...I have chosen to omit features of Python 2 that have been removed from Python 3". Beazley also doesn't include those features in Python 3 that haven't been back-ported. This approach is the author's attempt to make the book equally serve programmers using 2.x vs. 3.0. Not that this is the only update the text has to offer.

Beazley includes Python's newer features, particularly related to functional and meta-programming, resulting in the expansion of the chapters on functions and object-oriented programming, covering, for example, coroutines, decorators, and generators. The library chapters have also been updated to include modern Python modules, and the code examples and fragments reflect these upgrades. The book doesn't reinvent the wheel (just about a ton of documentation on Python already exists), but the advantage of this book is its organization, and the fact that all the data is located in the pages between the book's two covers.

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