Preface

Here’s the plan: when someone uses a feature you don’t understand, simply shoot them. This is easier than learning something new, and before too long the only living coders will be writing in an easily understood, tiny subset of Python 0.9.6 <wink>.¹

Tim Peters, Legendary core developer and author of The Zen of Python

“Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language.” Those are the first words of the official Python Tutorial. That is true, but there is a catch: because the language is easy to learn and put to use, many practicing Python programmers leverage only a fraction of its powerful features.

An experienced programmer may start writing useful Python code in a matter of hours. As the first productive hours become weeks and months, a lot of developers go on writing Python code with a very strong accent carried from languages learned before. Even if Python is your first language, often in academia and in introductory books it is presented while carefully avoiding language-specific features.

As a teacher introducing Python to programmers experienced in other languages, I see another problem that this book tries to address: we only miss stuff we know about. Coming from another language, anyone may guess that Python supports regular expressions, and look that up in the docs. But if you’ve never seen tuple unpacking or descriptors before, you will probably not search for them, and may end up not using those features just because they are specific to Python. ...