epilogue if you've read at least the first six and either done the exercises or written your own python programs independentlyyou should be in good position to build up your experience and programming skills as far as you want to go--python won' hold you backto improve and deepen your python language skillsif you read only the first six make sure you are familiar with the material in and that you read and experiment with at least some of the material in and in particular the with statement and context managers it is also worth reading at least ' section on testing keep in mindthoughthat apart from the pleasure and learning aspects of developing everything from scratchdoing so is rarely necessary in python we have already mentioned the standard library and the python package indexpypi python org/pypiboth of which provide huge amount of functionality in additionthe online python cookbook at code activestate comrecipes/langs/pythonoffers large number of trickstipsand ideasalthough it is python -oriented at the time of this writing it is also possible to create modules for python in other languages (any language that can export functionsas most canthese can be developed to work cooperatively with python using python' api shared libraries (dlls on windows)whether created by us or obtained from third partycan be accessed from python using the ctypes modulegiving us virtually unlimited access to the vast amount of functionality available over the internet thanks to the skill and generosity of open source programmers worldwide and if you want to participate in the python communitya good place to start is www python org/community where you will find wikis and many general and special-interest mailing lists