Useful in many roles from design & prototyping to testing deployment & maintenance Python is consistently ranked among today's most popular programming languages The third edition of this practical book provides a quick reference to the language-including Python 35 27 & highlights of 36-commonly used areas of its vast standard library & some of the most useful third-party modules & packages Ideal for programmers with some Python experience & those coming to Python from other programming languages this book covers a wide range of application areas including web & network programming XML handling database interactions & high-speed numeric computing Discover how Python provides a unique mix of elegance simplicity practicality & sheer power This edition covers Python syntax Object-Oriented Python standard library modules & third-party Python packages Python's support for file & text operations persistence & databases concurrent execution & numeric computations Networking basics event-driven programming & client-side network protocol modules Python extension modules & tools for packaging & distributing extensions modules & applications