The Python Standard Library

The Python Standard Library is a representative work by the well-known Python community blogger Doug Hellmann; the Chinese edition was translated by Liu Chi and others and published by China Machine Press in the "HZ Books Programmer's Library" series. The book was adapted from the author's "Python Module of the Week" blog series and systematically explains more than a hundred commonly used modules in the Python 2.7 standard library in the format of "one module per section, a runnable sample code, and its output." The book has 19 chapters, covering text processing (string, textwrap, re, difflib), data structures (collections, array, heapq, bisect, Queue, struct, weakref, copy, pprint), algorithm tools (functools, itertools, operator, contextlib), date and time (time, datetime, calendar), mathematical operations (decimal, fractions, random, math, statistics), the file system (os.path, glob, fnmatch, linecache, tempfile, shutil, filecmp, mmap, codecs, io), data persistence and exchange (pickle, shelve, dbm, sqlite3, xml.etree.ElementTree, csv), compression and archiving (zlib, gzip, bz2, tarfile, zipfile), cryptography (hashlib, hmac), processes, threads, and concurrency (subprocess, signal, threading, multiprocessing, concurrent.futures), network communication (socket, select, selectors, socketserver, ipaddress), and internet-related topics (urllib, base64, http.server, json, uuid, and so on), as well as application building blocks, internationalization, development tools, runtime features, and language tools. Each section not only explains how to use a module but also uses an independent small example to explain its mechanics and boundaries, with links to further resources at the end, so the book suits both systematic chapter-by-chapter study and quick desk reference. Note that the book targets Python 2.7; the author later published The Python 3 Standard Library for Python 3, and some examples in The Python Standard Library need adjustment under Python 3, so readers should consult the official documentation alongside it.