This book is about using Python to get jobs done on Windows.
We hope by now you have heard of Python, the exciting object-oriented scripting language that is rapidly entering the programming mainstream. Although Python is perhaps better known on the Unix platform, it offers a superb degree of integration with the Windows environment. One of us, Mark Hammond, is responsible for many of Python's Windows extensions and has coauthored the Python COM support, both of which are major topics of this book. This book can thus be considered the definitive reference to date for Python on the Windows platform.
This is intended to be a practical book focused on tasks. It doesn't aim to teach Python programming, although we do provide a brief tutorial. Instead, it aims to cover:
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How Python works on Windows
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The key integration technologies supported by Python on Windows, such as the Win32 extensions, which let you call the Windows API, and the support for COM
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Examples in many topic areas showing what Python can do and how to put it to work
In the end, we hope you will have a clear idea of what Python can do and how to put it to work on real-world tasks.
