Python Link Collection

This is the starting point for everything Python.

Support for Python development comes from memberships in the Python Software Foundation and from corporate and university sponsorships of The Python Consortium. And of course, from contributions of code from developers around the world.

A 100% pure Java port of Python.

The port allows Python to be embedded, for example, in Java applications, applets, servlets and EJB's. With Jython you can add a Swing user interface to a Python application. Or utilize Python's powerful regular expressions and text processing facilities from within a servlet to develop a web application.

The quickest and most authoritative way to learn the Python language is through Guido's on-line tutorial. See especially Chapter 9: Classes which is an introduction to Python's object oriented facilities. Guido compares and contrasts Python to C++, Smalltalk, and Modula-3.

Download the full set of Python documentation in HTML, PDF, LaTeX, or Postcript. The set includes the Language Reference, Tutorial, and Library Reference. The latter is indispensable for developers who want to take advantage of the rich collection of modules available in Python.

One of the most ambitious computer training programs conceived, CP4E has set a goal of providing intuitive, graphical tools and a curriculum for teaching Python to large numbers of non-technical users. These users would then be empowered to customize their favorite applications. (Shades of MS' VBA ambitions?)

In Guido's words: "If we are successful, non-experts will be able use their computers and other intelligent devices much more effectively..."

An O'Reilly book written by Mark Lutz and David Ascher, Learning Python is an excellent introduction to the Python language.

The chapter on classes provides a very nice introduction to designing objects with Python. The relationship of classes to namespaces, inheritance, specialization of methods within inheritance, polymorphism, operator overloading, visibility and delegation are all explained through straight-forward examples.

Another O'Reilly book written by Mark Lutz, Programming Python is an expansive, thorough introduction to the Python language that also contains significant material on advanced topics such as user interfaces and integration with C libraries. Published in 1996, this book was way ahead of the Python wave. The second edition, fully updated, was released in March, 2001.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night... This is the prelude to the author's saga of how Python saved the day by allowing him to quickly create a script to transfer his files over a slow modem. What is fascinating about the example is how it gradually evolves into a fully object-oriented application. Along the way the benefits of object-orientation are convincingly developed.

See the author's single web page(!) summary of Python.

Python veteran Frederik Lundh has compiled a comprehensive listing of almost 2,500 newsgroup postings he made during the last 4 years dealing with scripting for the Python standard library. Sample scripts for nearly every module in the standard library are supplied.

David Beazley has compiled an indispensable desk reference for the Python language and libraries. If you are hacking out some Python code, this book's clean layout and extensive index will save you valuable time finding the right syntax. Together with O'Reilly's Webmaster in a Nutshell, you have a potent combination for brewing up any kind of web application.

Publisher Manning has shown itself as a strong challenger to O'Reilly with this excellent guide to learning and using Python. Authors Daryl Harms and Kenneth McDonald have created a highly useable, methodically organized reference with many code examples. When we need to do something quick in Python, this is where we look first.

The biggest Python event of the year, the conference was held in Arlington, Virginia on January 24-27, 2000. In spite of the snow blizzard, the conference was well attended and very educational. You can find the proceedings of the conference online, thanks to the efforts of Foretec Seminars, Inc.

One of our favorite sessions at the conference was given by Jeffrey Elkner, a teacher at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, who described how he is successfully introducing his students to programming by using Python as a first language! Mr. Elkner has been inspired by Guido's CP4E project; he will certainly be in the vanguard! One of his students described an open-source project which they have already begun to develop which will manage student records.

The Python Conferences and Workshops page lists proceedings from other years.

Zope is an open source web application server written in Python.

Zope allows web sites to deploy Python objects in place of the CGI's required by conventional web servers. Zope's SQL support provides integration between Zope objects and relational databases. A number of adapters to common SQL databases are available. A template language called DTML provides the integration between Zope objects and the HTML generated by the server. Several ISP's have already begun hosting Zope.

Medusa is a high-performance internet server written in Python. It takes a unique approach to scalability by running a limited number of threads and employing asynchronous event handling to multiplex the processing of a large number of connections. Medusa is used by the Zope application server as the underlying web server.

wxPython is a Python module which encapsulates the wxWindows GUI classes (written in C++). wxWindows has been ported to Windows and GTK for Unix so far and allows users to develop professional looking, cross-platform user interfaces for their Python applications.