The Python Cookbook is a collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for Python programmers, written by Python programmers. Over the past year, members of the Python community have contributed material to an online repository of Python recipes hosted by ActiveState. This book contains the best of those recipes, accompanied by overviews and background material by key Python figures. The recipes in the Python Cookbook range from simple tasks, such as working with dictionaries and list comprehensions, to entire modules that demonstrate templating systems and network monitoring. This book contains over 200 recipes on the following topics:

• Searching and sorting

• Manipulating text

• Working with files and the filesystem

• Object-oriented programming

• Dealing with threads and processes

• System administration

• Interacting with databases

• Creating user interfaces

• Network and web programming

• Processing XML

• Distributed programming

• Debugging and testing

• Extending Python

This book is a treasure trove of useful code for all Python programmers, from novices to advanced practitioners, with contributions from such Python luminaries as Guido Van Rossum, David Ascher, Tim Peters, Paul Prescod, Mark Hammond, and Alex Martelli, as well as over 100 other Python programmers. The recipes highlight Python best practices and can be used directly in day-to-day programming tasks, as a source of ideas, or as a way to learn more about Python. The recipes in the Python Cookbook were edited by David Ascher, who is on the board of the Python Software Foundation and is the co-author of Learning Python, and Alex Martelli, who is known for his numerous and exhaustive postings on the Python mailing list. The book contains a foreword by Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 42 Ratings

Go to the website - 2009-02-18
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book when Python was relatively young and it definitely got the job done on more than a few occasions. The language (and the book) has evolved and some of the recipes are a bit outdated. If you look up Python Cookbook recipes on Google or some other search engine, it will take you to the ActiveState site that has all of these recipes and more. Two stars because the book is valuable in that it is concise - searching through a slew of recipes on a site can be a bit of a chore.

Out of date. Not very useful. - 2009-04-01
Reviewer Rating:
This book is in need of an update for Python 2.6/3.0 syntax. It covers the "new" Python 2.4.

I bought the book for a project in Python at work, but I never even consulted it once. YMMV.

Very useful book to see how to best address everyday problems - 2009-03-16
Reviewer Rating:
This is not a learning book, nor a reference book. It is a book that contains "recipes", descriptions of how to perform everyday issues, such as reading a file, sorting a dictionary, etc. It is excellent for this. Buy in conjunction with "Learning Python" or "Python in a Nutshell".

Good Cookbook - 2009-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
I started reading through the Python Cookbook as a beginner with very little experience in Python but fluent in several other languages ranging from Object Oriented to Functional languages. I found the book was very good to learn from by example. I would recommend it to anyone who has had programming experience before and is just starting out on Python to quickly grasp new areas of the language. I would also recommend this to intermediate Python programmers as a resource for being able to quickly identify common problems and elegant solutions to them. I found the book very easy to understand, despite my lack of prior exposure to the language and I felt like it was a very good learning experience. I'm looking forward to using Python more for my day to day tasks now that I have been introduced to many examples of how powerful a language it can really be.

Invaluable - 2008-12-20
Reviewer Rating:
There are so many tricks to be learned here that you can use for either mundane tasks or for more advanced uses of python.

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