Python is a versatile and powerful language that can be used for a wide variety of tasks. In this book, we'll look at how Python can be an amazing tool that will make your life easier.

Useful Python

Preface

Python is a versatile and powerful language that can be used for a wide variety of tasks. One of the most common use cases for Python is as a “glue” language: it helps us combine skills and programs we already know how to use by allowing us to easily convert data from one format to another. This means that we can take data in one format that we don’t have tools to manipulate and change it into data for tools that we’re comfortable with. Whether we need to process a CSV, web page, or JSON file, Python can help us get the data into a format we can use.

Python as Glue

Python is good at translating data from one format to another and altering it along the way, as we saw in the first tutorial. But a good proportion of what we may want to do involves controlling and working with other programs and other data sources that aren’t files.

Python for Stitching Together Other Things

Python is a powerful tool that can be used to solve a wide variety of problems, both big and small. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to use Python to answer questions, solve puzzles, and simulate various scenarios. Some are too large to solve without help, but small enough that they can be reasonably solved on a computer. For others, we’ll use code to do some of the heavy lifting, to verify the answers we might have obtained some other way, or just to have a little fun. When we’re playing word puzzles or checking out fun recreational math tricks, a little code can go a long way.

Words and Numbers

In the previous chapters of this book, we used existing Python modules to bring in new functionality to our scripts. Python (unlike many other languages) actually comes with modules for all sorts of useful functions. The developers of Python refer to this as a “batteries included” philosophy, where the language comes ready-supplied with many modules. The collection that comes with Python is called the standard library (a term often abbreviated to “stdlib”), and it’s all documented as part of the Standard Library Reference .

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