About the Programs in This Book

This fourth edition of this book, and all the program examples in it, is based on Python version 3.0. In addition, most of its examples run under Python 2.6, as described in the text, and notes for Python 2.6 readers are mixed in along the way.

Because this text focuses on the core language, however, you can be fairly sure that most of what it has to say won’t change very much in future releases of Python. Most of this book applies to earlier Python versions, too, except when it does not; naturally, if you try using extensions added after the release you’ve got, all bets are off.

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As a rule of thumb, the latest Python is the best Python. Because this book focuses on the core language, most of it also applies to Jython, the Java-based Python language implementation, as well as other Python implementations described in Chapter 2.

Source code for the book’s examples, as well as exercise solutions, can be fetched from the book’s website at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596158064/. So, how do you run the examples? We’ll study startup details in Chapter 3, so please stay tuned for information on this front.