Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By : Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham

Overview of this book

Experienced programmers want to know how to enhance their craft and we want to help them start as apprentices with Python. We know that before mastering Python you need to learn the culture and the tools to become a productive member of any Python project. Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to Python programming, providing you with the insight and technical craftsmanship you need to be a productive member of any Python project. Python is a big language, and it’s not our intention with this book to cover everything there is to know. We just want to make sure that you, as the developer, know the tools, basic idioms and of course the ins and outs of the language, the standard library and other modules to be able to jump into most projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
Afterword – Just the Beginning

str – an immutable sequence of Unicode code points


Strings in Python have the datatype str and we've been using them extensively already. A string is a sequence of Unicode code-points, and for the most part you can think of code-points as being like characters, although they aren't strictly equivalent. The sequence of code-points in a Python string is immutable, so once you've constructed a string, you can't modify its contents.

The difference between code points, letters, characters, and glyphs can be confusing. Let's try to clarify with an example: The Greek capital letter Σ (sigma), which is of course used widely in the writing of Greek text, is also used by mathematicians to signify summation of a series. These two uses of the letter sigma are represented by distinct Unicode characters called GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA and N-ARY SUMMATION respectively. Typically, where the same letter is used to convey different information, a different Unicode character is used. Another example would...