introduction built on procedural foundations--for examplemaking use of the same data typescollection data typesand control structures covers writing and reading files for binary filesthe coverage includes compression and random accessand for text filesthe coverage includes parsing manually and with regular expressions this also shows how to write and read xml filesincluding using element treesdom (document object model)and sax (simple api for xml revisits material covered in some earlier exploring many of python' more advanced features in the areas of data types and collection data typescontrol structuresfunctionsand object-oriented programming this also introduces many new functionsclassesand advanced techniquesincluding functional-style programming and the use of coroutines--the material it covers is both challenging and rewarding is different from all the other in that it discusses techniques and libraries for debuggingtestingand profiling programsrather than introducing new python features the remaining cover various advanced topics shows techniques for spreading program' workload over multiple processes and over multiple threads shows how to write client/server applications using python' standard networking support covers database programming (both simple key-value "dbmfiles and sql databases explains and illustrates python' regular expression mini-language and covers the regular expressions module follows on from the regular expressions by showing basic parsing techniques using regular expressionsand also using two third-party modulespyparsing and ply finally introduces gui (graphical user interfaceprogramming using the tkinter module that is part of python' standard library in additionthe book has very brief epiloguea selected bibliographyand of coursean index most of the book' are quite long to keep all the related material together in one place for ease of reference howeverthe are broken down into sectionssubsectionsand sometimes subsubsectionsso it is easy to read at pace that suits youfor exampleby reading one section or subsection at time obtaining and installing python if you have modern and up-to-date mac or other unix-like system you may already have python installed you can check by typing python - (note the capital vin console (terminal app on mac os )--if the version is you've already got python and don' have to install it yourself if python wasn' found at all it may be that it has name which includes version number try