Download Python 2.1.3 Documentation (8 April 2002)

This release of the Python documentation is almost identical to the Python 2.1.2 documentation, but a number of links to Web resources have been updated, and a few minor corrections have been made. Formats other than HTML are not being released at this time; please continue to use the Python 2.1.2 versions of the documentation for typeset versions.

Python 2.1.2 documentation in other formats is available for download.

To download an archive containing all the documents from this release, follow one of links in this table. The numbers in the table are the size of the download files in Kilobytes.

Contents

These archives contain the following documents:

• Python Tutorial
• Python Reference Manual
• Python Library Reference
• Macintosh Module Reference
• Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter
• Python/C API Reference Manual
• Installing Python Modules
• Distributing Python Modules
• Documenting Python

The HTML bundle also contains the Global Module Index, which contains direct links to the documentation for all the modules documented in the Python Library Reference and Macintosh Modules Reference.

These documents are not available for download individually.

Unpacking

Unix users should download the .tar.bz2 or .tgz archives; these are bzipped (or gzipped) tar archives and can be handled in the usual way using tar and the bzip2 or GNU gzip program. The InfoZIP unzip program can be used to handle the ZIP archives if desired. Note that the .tar.bz2 archives provide the best compression and fastest download times.

Windows users can use the ZIP archives since those are customary on that platform. These are created on Unix using the InfoZIP zip program. They may be unpacked using the free WiZ tool (from the InfoZIP developers) or the proprietary WinZip 7.0 tool. Many other tools for handling ZIP archives are available; any of them should work. WinZip can also handle the gzipped tar archives if needed, but be careful that the filenames may be mangled if you download these using a Web browser. Note that the .tar.bz2 files are smaller than the other archives; Windows users may want to install the bzip2 tools on their systems as well. Windows binaries for a command-line tool are available at The bzip2 and libbzip2 official home page. For a more typical Windows graphical application, take a look at PowerArchiver. The bzip2 tools are free, but PowerArchiver is shareware.

Problems

Slow and aborted downloads: It has been reported that some versions of the MacOS IP stack stall when downloading large files. This problem only appears sporadically; if you have difficulties retrieving any of these files under MacOS, please be patient and try again later. The problems are supposed to be corrected in MacOS 9. (For more information, see Apple's Technical Note for Mac OS 9; in particular, see the third bulleted item under "Open Transport 2.5" near the end.)

If you have comments or suggestions for the Python documentation, please send email to <docs@python.org>.