Python Standard Library

Python Standard Library is a reference to the standard library written by Fredrik Lundh, a well-known developer in the Python community and author of the Python Imaging Library (PIL), for Python programmers with some experience. Python is a highly modular language, and the functions most frequently used in daily development come largely from the standard library distributed with the interpreter, including basic support modules, operating system interfaces, network protocols, file format handling, data conversion, threads and processes, and data persistence. The book goes through these modules one by one and includes more than three hundred annotated example scripts demonstrating the typical use of each module in real code. Unlike the official reference documentation, which emphasizes interface listings, this book emphasizes "short runnable scripts": the author long answered questions on the comp.lang.python newsgroup and distilled from thousands of questions the most common confusions developers face—not knowing what a module can do, choosing the wrong module, or reinventing the wheel. The book shows solutions directly with examples that are as short, adaptable, and portable as possible. It covers the modules added in Python 2.0 and related changes, and the examples were tested on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. Organized by theme, it moves through core modules, more standard modules, threads and processes, data representation, file formats, mail and news message processing, network protocols, internationalization, multimedia, data storage, tools and utilities, platform-specific modules, implementation support modules, and other modules, with a CD-ROM containing all the example code. As a reference published in 2001, its module information reflects early Python 2.x and differs from today's Python 3 standard library; it is best read as historical material for understanding the design ideas and idioms of the standard library.