When implementing Python solutions, it's helpful to scan the standard library for relevant modules. The library is large, making it somewhat intimidating at first. We can, however, focus our search.

We can break the Python Standard Library document into three portions. The first five chapters are general reference material that all Python programmers need to understand. The next 20 chapters, plus chapters 28 and 32, describe modules that we might incorporate into a wide variety of applications. The remaining chapters are less useful; they're more focused on Python internals and ways in which to extend the language itself.

The name and the summary of a module in the library table of contents may not provide enough information to see all of the ways in which a module might be used. The bisect module, for example, can be extended to create a fast dictionary that retains its keys in a defined order. This isn't obvious without careful reading of the description of...