Programming Python, 3rd Edition

Part V. Tools and Techniques

This part of the book presents a collection of additional Python application topics. Most of the tools presented along the way can be used in a wide variety of application domains. You’ll find the following chapters here:

Chapter 19, Databases and Persistence

This chapter covers commonly used and advanced Python techniques for storing information between program executions—DBM files, object pickling (serialization), object shelves, the ZODB object database, and Python’s SQL database interfaces. MySQL is used for the SQL examples, but the API is portable to other systems.

Chapter 20, Data Structures

This chapter explores techniques for implementing more advanced data structures in Python—stacks, sets, binary search trees, graphs, and the like. In Python, these take the form of object implementations.

Chapter 21, Text and Language

This chapter addresses Python tools and techniques for parsing text-based information—string splits and joins, regular expression matching, recursive descent parsing, and more advanced language-based topics.

This is the last pure Python part of the book, and it makes heavy use of tools presented earlier in the text, especially the Tkinter GUI library. For instance, a tree browser (PyTree) is used to illustrate various object structures, a form browser (PyForm) helps make database concepts more concrete, and a calculator GUI (PyCalc) serves to demonstrate language processing and code reuse concepts.