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eBooks from David Ascher
All books and eBooks by David Ascher:
Learning Python
Learning Python, PDF
by Mark Lutz and David Ascher
Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 A Python Q&A Session If you’ve bought this book, you may already know what Python is, and why it’s an important tool to learn. If not, you probably won’t be sold on Python until you’ve learned the language by reading the rest of this book and have done a project or two. But before jumping into details, the first few pages briefly introduce some of the main reasons behind Python’s popularity. To begin sculpting a definition of Python, this chapter takes the form of a question and answer session, which poses some of the most common non-technical questions asked by beginners. Why Do People Use Python? Because there are many programming languages available today, this is the usual first question of newcomers. Given the hundreds of thousands of Python users out there today, there really is no way to answer this question with complete accuracy. The
(2004)
Python Cookbook
by Alex Martelli, Anna Ravensc..., and David Ascher
Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 Text 1.0 Introduction Credit: Fred L. Drake, Jr., PythonLabs Text-processing applications form a substantial part of the application space for any scripting language, if only because everyone can agree that text processing is useful. Everyone has bits of text that need to be reformatted or transformed in various ways. The catch, of course, is that every application is just a little bit different from every other application, so it can be difficult to find just the right reusable code to work with different file formats, no matter how similar they are. What Is Text? Sounds like an easy question, doesn’t it? After all, we know it when we see it, don’t we? Text is a sequence of characters, and it is distinguished from binary data by that very fact. Binary data, after all, is a sequence of bytes. Unfortunately, all data enters our applications as a
(2007)
