Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language

This edition has been superseded by the second edition! The two editions have mostly the same material, apart from corrections and a couple of new chapters in the second edition (which is why it is bigger). They are both around the same price, so the second edition is much better value. This first edition covers Python 3.0; the second edition covers both Python 3.0 and 3.1 (clearly marking the differences.) Keep in mind that 3.1 is the minimum 3.x edition that Python's developers recommend (3.0 won't even get security fixes). Also, thanks to the language moratorium, the Python 3.1 language will be unchanged in Python 3.2 (which will have bugfixes & improvements to the library & many other under the hood improvements of course), so the second edition is good for Python 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2.
Python 3 is the best version of the language yet: It is more powerful, convenient, consistent, and expressive than ever before. Now, Mark Summerfield demonstrates how to write code that takes full advantage of Python 3's features and idioms. The first book written from a completely "Python 3" viewpoint, Programming in Python 3 brings together all the knowledge you need to write any program, use any standard or third-party Python 3 library, and create new library modules of your own.
 
Summerfield draws on his many years of Python experience to share deep insights into Python 3 development you won't find anywhere else. This book's coverage includes
 

• Developing in Python using procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming paradigms
• Creating custom packages and modules
• Writing and reading binary, text, and XML files, including optional compression, random access, and text and XML parsing
• Leveraging advanced data types, collections, control structures, and functions
• Spreading program workloads across multiple processes and threads
• Programming SQL databases and key-value DBM files
• Utilizing Python's regular expression mini-language and module
• Building usable, efficient, GUI-based applications
• Advanced programming techniques, including generators, function and class decorators, context managers, descriptors, abstract base classes, metaclasses, and more

Programming in Python 3 serves as both tutorial and language reference, with all the examples tested on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and downloadable from the author's website.