This book is intended as a concise intermediate level treatise on the Python programming language. There is a need for this due to the lack of availability of materials for python programmers at this level. The material contained in this book is targeted at the programmer that has been through a beginner level introduction to the Python programming language or that has some experience in a different object oriented programming language such as Java and wants to gain a more in-depth understanding of the Python programming language in a holistic manner. It is not intended as an introductory tutorial for beginners although programmers with some experience in other languages may find the very short tutorial included instructive.

The book covers only a handful of topics but tries to provide a holistic and in-depth coverage of these topics. It starts with a short tutorial introduction to get the reader up to speed with the basics of Python; experienced programmers from other object oriented languages such as Java may find that this is all the introduction to Python that they need. This is followed by a discussion of the Python object model then it moves on to discussing object oriented programming in Python. With a firm understanding of the Python object model, it goes ahead to discuss functions and functional programming. This is followed by a discussion of meta-progr