Primed with the language's foundational knowledge, youll then be introduced to Pythons file-handling, database, graphical user interface, and string-handling capabilities. Additionally, Hetland offers an excellent review of Pythons object-oriented, functional, and exception-handling capabilities. All chapters are peppered with references to Python's useful built-in functions, which is done with the intention of demonstrating the considerable features offered by the default Python distribution.

Hetland devotes the second half of the book to project development, taking great care to choose a series of ten increasingly complex applications that are of timely and wide-ranging interest to burgeoning and expert developers alike. Project focus includes automated document conversion, newsgroup administration, graphical PDF document generation, remote document maintenance, the creation of a peer-to-peer system with XML-RPC, database integration, and GUI and game development.