The books in this section look at practical uses of Python rather than aspects of the core language.

Core Python Applications Programming 3rd Edition

Author: Wesley J Chun
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Pages: 888
ISBN: 978-0132678209

This book impressed Alex Armstrong enough to award 4.5 stars. The book isn't about learning Python and it doesn't go into exotic tricks and ways of using the language that are unusual. What it does is to take a set of topics and explain how best to tackle them using Python. In most cases this amounts to a tour of some Python library or other.

Alex says that most of the topics are covered in just enough detail for you to understand what is going on and get started with your own program. After you have moved on beyond the "getting started" phase, you will almost certainly run into problems that are not covered by and not even explored in this book. 

This book is not for the expert or the complete beginner, but if you live in the middle ground and want to see what real world tasks you can tackle using Python this will be a welcome addition to your bookshelf.

Black Hat Python

Author: Justin Seitz
Publisher: No Starch Press
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9781593275907

Giving this book four stars, reviewer Alex Armstrong thought some potential readers - those attracted by the subtitle "Python Programming for Hackers and Pentesters" - would be disappointed because while it does include some info for these readers, you can't really learn such things that easily.  It really isn't about real world routine penetration testing, for example. However, it does present a collection of technical projects and ideas that might please you if you want to use Python in this way. 

This is a good book if you want some fairly technical projects in Python and aren't put off, or better if you are attracted to, the black hat aspect of the presentation.

Web Scraping with Python (2e)

Author: Ryan Mitchell 
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 308
ISBN: 978-491985571

This particular book is written by someone who has had plenty of experience and recommends using Python and its associated tools, according to Alex Armstrong, who awarded the book four stars, saying that this is a good book and it's easy to read.

Some readers might find areas that appear to be off topic or teaching you things that you already know, but this is the author telling readers things they need to know in order to successfully scrape web pages.

Alex would have like more insight into how scraping problems are solved. This, however, is a tall order because they are usually highly specific to the task in hand. However, there are general ways of thinking about the problems and it would be nice to see an attempt to catalog or classify these.

Overall, though, this book is recommended if you want a quick course in web scraping in all its forms. Its main use is to point you in the direction of the right tools for the job.

Instant Flask Web Development  

Author: Ron DuPlain
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Pages: 78
ISBN: 978-1782169628

This book in the Packt Publish Instant series set out to create a fully functional scheduling application in Flask, one of  Python’s micro-web frameworks. The books are all short - just 78 pages for this one - but reviewer Mike Driscoll felt it deserved a 4.8 star rating.

The premise of the book is to create a fully functional scheduling application in Flask, with the bulk of the book used to explain request/response handing and working with the database (how to add, edit, delete, and query).

There are nuggets about interesting plugins, such as Flask-WTForms, and how they work, and Mike thinks this is what the book does best: whetting your appetite such that you want to learn more and more.

He concluded:

"While there are some rough edges here and there in the book, I found it a worthwhile read. I found myself wanting to learn more about Flask and its plugins when I finished reading it."

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