If you do much work on computers, eventually you find that theres some task youd like to automate. For example, you may wish to perform a search-and-replace over a large number of text files, or rename and rearrange a bunch of photo files in a complicated way. Perhaps youd like to write a small custom database, or a specialized GUI application, or a simple game. If youre a professional software developer, you may have to work with several C/C++/Java libraries but find the usual write/compile/test/re-compile cycle is too slow. Perhaps youre writing a test suite for such a library and find writing the testing code a tedious task. Or maybe youve written a program that could use an extension language, and you dont want to design and implement a whole new language for your application. Python is just the language for you. This book is a paper version of the freely available electronic documentation of the python project.