Part IV: Assorted Topics

This part of the book is a collection of additional Python application topics. Most of the tools presented along the way can be used in a wide variety of application domains. You'll find the following chapters here:

Chapter 16. This chapter covers commonly used and advanced Python techniques for storing information between program executions -- DBM files, object pickling (serialization), object shelves, and Python's SQL database interfaces.

Chapter 17. This chapter explores techniques for implementing more advanced data structures in Python -- stacks, sets, binary search trees, graphs, and the like. In Python, these take the form of object implementations.

Chapter 18. This chapter addresses Python tools and techniques for parsing text-based information -- string splits and joins, regular expression matching, recursive descent parsing, and advanced language-based topics.

This is the last pure Python part of the book and makes heavy use of tools presented earlier in the text, especially the Tkinter GUI library. For instance, a tree browser is used to illustrate various object structures, a form browser helps make database concepts more concrete, and a calculator GUI serves to demonstrate language processing and code reuse concepts.