Contents

• 1 Whetting Your Appetite
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 Where From Here
• 2 Using the Python Interpreter
  • 2.1 Invoking the Interpreter
    • Argument Passing
    • Interactive Mode
  • 2.2 The Interpreter and its Environment
    • Error Handling
    • Executable Python scripts
    • The Interactive Startup File
• 3 An Informal Introduction to Python
  • 3.1 Using Python as a Calculator
    • Numbers
    • Strings
    • Lists
  • 3.2 First Steps Towards Programming
• 4 More Control Flow Tools
  • 4.1 If Statements
  • 4.2 For Statements
  • 4.3 The range() Function
  • 4.4 Break and Continue Statements, and Else Clauses on Loops
  • 4.5 Pass Statements
  • 4.6 Defining Functions
  • 4.7 More on Defining Functions
    • Default Argument Values
    • Keyword Arguments
    • Arbitrary Argument Lists
• 5 Data Structures
  • 5.1 More on Lists
    • Functional Programming Tools
  • 5.2 The del statement
  • 5.3 Tuples and Sequences
  • 5.4 Dictionaries
  • 5.5 More on Conditions
  • 5.6 Comparing Sequences and Other Types
• 6 Modules
  • 6.1 More on Modules
    • The Module Search Path
    • ``Compiled'' Python files
  • 6.2 Standard Modules
  • 6.3 The dir() function
• 7 Input and Output
  • 7.1 Fancier Output Formatting
  • 7.2 Reading and Writing Files
    • Methods of file objects
    • The pickle module
• 8 Errors and Exceptions
  • 8.1 Syntax Errors
  • 8.2 Exceptions
  • 8.3 Handling Exceptions
  • 8.4 Raising Exceptions
  • 8.5 User-defined Exceptions
  • 8.6 Defining Clean-up Actions
• 9 Classes
  • 9.1 A word about terminology
  • 9.2 Python scopes and name spaces
  • 9.3 A first look at classes
    • Class definition syntax
    • Class objects
    • Instance objects
    • Method objects
  • 9.4 Random remarks
  • 9.5 Inheritance
    • Multiple inheritance
  • 9.6 Private variables through name mangling
  • 9.7 Odds and ends
    • Exceptions Can Be Classes
• 10 What Now?
• 11 Recent Additions as of Release 1.1
  • 11.1 Lambda Forms
  • 11.2 Documentation Strings
• A Interactive Input Editing and History Substitution
  • A.1 Line Editing
  • A.2 History Substitution
  • A.3 Key Bindings
  • A.4 Commentary
• About this document ...