python is probably the easiest-to-learn and nicest-to-use programming language in widespread use python code is clear to read and writeand it is concise without being cryptic python is very expressive languagewhich means that we can usually write far fewer lines of python code than would be required for an equivalent application written insayc+or java python is cross-platform languagein generalthe same python program can be run on windows and unix-like systems such as linuxbsdand mac os xsimply by copying the file or files that make up the program to the target machinewith no "buildingor compiling necessary it is possible to create python programs that use platform-specific functionalitybut this is rarely necessary since almost all of python' standard library and most third-party libraries are fully and transparently cross-platform one of python' great strengths is that it comes with very complete standard library--this allows us to do such things as download file from the internetunpack compressed archive fileor create web serverall with just one or few lines of code and in addition to the standard librarythousands of thirdparty libraries are availablesome providing more powerful and sophisticated facilities than the standard library--for examplethe twisted networking library and the numpy numeric library--while others provide functionality that is too specialized to be included in the standard library--for examplethe simpy simulation package most of the third-party libraries are available from the python package indexpypi python org/pypi python can be used to program in proceduralobject-orientedand to lesser extentin functional stylealthough at heart python is an object-oriented language this book shows how to write both procedural and object-oriented programsand also teaches python' functional programming features the purpose of this book is to show you how to write python programs in good idiomatic python styleand to be useful reference for the python language after the initial reading although python is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary advance on python some older practices are no longer appropriate or necessary in python and new practices have been introduced to take advantage of python features python is better language than python --it builds on the many years of experience with python and adds lots of new features (and omits python ' misfeatures)to make it even more of pleasure to use than python as well as more convenienteasierand more consistent