Table of Contents

Introduction1

Chapter 1: Rapid Introduction to Procedural Programming7

Creating and Running Python Programs 7

Python’s “Beautiful Heart” 12

Examples 36

Summary 42

Exercises 44

Chapter 2:Data Types47

Identifiers and Keywords 47

Integral Types 50

Floating-Point Types 54

Strings 61

Examples 88

Summary 95

Exercises 97

Chapter 3: Collection Data Types99

Sequence Types 99

Set Types 112

Mapping Types 117

Iterating and Copying Collections 127

Examples 138

Summary 146

Exercises 147

Chapter 4: Control Structures and Functions149

Control Structures 149

Exception Handling 153

Custom Functions 161

Example: make_html_skeleton.py 175

Summary 181

Exercise 182

Chapter 5: Modules185

Modules and Packages 185

Overview of Python’s Standard Library 202

Summary 219

Exercise 220

Chapter 6: Object-Oriented Programming223

The Object-Oriented Approach 224

Custom Classes 228

Custom Collection Classes 251

Summary 272

Exercises 274

Chapter 7: File Handling277

Writing and Reading Binary Data 282

Writing and Parsing Text Files 294

Writing and Parsing XML Files 302

Random Access Binary Files 313

Summary 326

Exercises 327

Chapter 8: Advanced Programming Techniques329

Further Procedural Programming 330

Further Object-Oriented Programming 353

Functional-Style Programming 384

Example: Valid.py 388

Summary 390

Exercises 392

Chapter 9: Processes and Threading395

Delegating Work to Processes 396

Delegating Work to Threads 400

Summary 409

Exercises 410

Chapter 10: Networking413

Creating a TCP Client 414

Creating a TCP Server 420

Summary 427

Exercises 427

Chapter 11: Database Programming431

DBM Databases 432

SQL Databases 436

Summary 443

Exercise 444

Chapter 12: Regular Expressions445

Python’s Regular Expression Language 446

The Regular Expression Module 455

Summary 464

Exercises 465

Chapter 13: Introduction to GUI Programming467

Dialog-Style Programs 470

Main-Window-Style Programs 476

Summary 491

Exercises 491

Epilogue493

Index495

About the Author

Mark Summerfield is a computer science graduate with many years experience working in the software industry, primarily as a programmer. He also spent almost three years as Trolltech's documentation manager, during which he founded and edited Trolltech's technical journal, Qt Quarterly. (Trolltech is now Nokia's Qt Software.) Mark is the co-author of C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (Prentice Hall, 2006) and author of Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: The Definitive Guide to PyQt Programming (Prentice Hall, 2008). Mark owns Qtrac Ltd.,