What Now?

Reading this tutorial has probably reinforced your interest in using Python --- you should be eager to apply Python to solving your real-world problems. Where should you go to learn more?

This tutorial is part of Python's documentation set. Some other documents in the set are:

• builtins-index: gives details about Python's built-in types and functions.
• library-index: gives complete (though terse) reference material about types, functions, and the modules in the standard library. The standard Python distribution includes a lot of additional code. There are modules to read Unix mailboxes, retrieve documents via HTTP, generate random numbers, parse command-line options, compress data, and many other tasks. Skimming through the Library Reference will give you an idea of what's available.
• installing-index explains how to install additional modules written by other Python users.
• reference-index: A detailed explanation of Python's syntax and semantics. It's heavy reading, but is useful as a complete guide to the language itself.

More Python resources:

• https://www.python.org: The major Python website. It contains code, documentation, and pointers to Python-related pages around the web.
• https://docs.python.org: Fast access to Python's documentation.
• https://pypi.org: The Python Package Index, previously also nicknamed the Cheese Shop[^1], is an index of user-created Python modules that are available for download. Once you begin releasing code, you can register it here so that others can find it.
• https://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/: The Python Cookbook is a sizable collection of code examples, larger modules, and useful scripts. Particularly notable contributions are collected in a book also titled Python Cookbook (O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 0-596-00797-3.)
• https://pyvideo.org collects links to Python-related videos from conferences and user-group meetings.
• https://scipy.org: The Scientific Python project includes modules for fast array computations and manipulations plus a host of packages for such things as linear algebra, Fourier transforms, non-linear solvers, random number distributions, statistical analysis and the like.

For Python-related questions and problem reports, you can post to the newsgroup comp.lang.python, or send them to the mailing list at python-list@python.org. The newsgroup and mailing list are gatewayed, so messages posted to one will automatically be forwarded to the other. There are hundreds of postings a day, asking (and answering) questions, suggesting new features, and announcing new modules. Mailing list archives are available at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/.

Before posting, be sure to check the list of Frequently Asked Questions <faq-index> (also called the FAQ). The FAQ answers many of the questions that come up again and again, and may already contain the solution for your problem.

Footnotes

[^1]: "Cheese Shop" is a Monty Python sketch: a customer enters a cheese shop, but whatever cheese he asks for, the clerk says it's missing.