About the Programs in This Book

This book, and all the program examples in it, are based on Python Version 2.2, and reflect the upcoming 2.3 release. But since we'll stick to the core language, you can be fairly sure that most of what we have to say won't change very much in later releases of Python. Most of this book applies to earlier Python versions too, except when it does not; naturally, if you try using extensions added after the release you've got, all bets are off. As a rule of thumb, the latest Python is the best Python. Because this book focuses on the core language, most of it also applies to Jython, the Java-based Python language implementation, as well other Python implementations, described in Chapter 2.

Source code for the book's examples, as well as exercise solutions, can be fetched from the book's web site at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lpython2/. So how do you run the examples? We'll get into startup details in Chapter 3, so please stay tuned for the details on this front.