VANCOUVER, British Columbia – March 6, 2001 – ActiveState, the leader in open source programming languages, and O’Reilly & Associates Inc., the premier technology book publisher, have partnered on the first of its kind collaborative programming book, the Python Cookbook. The cookbook will be a repository of rigorously reviewed Python recipes that have been contributed by the Python community for the community, which will be freely available for download.

"I'm very glad to be part of this community effort," said Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. "This fills a need in the Python community for a reviewed, centralized repository of Python solutions and examples."

The Python Cookbook will be freely available for review and use from the ActiveState website. As a community effort, it is different from any other project. The book will be a compilation of recipes contributed by the Python community, along with examples and recommended solutions by core Python contributors. It is intended to be a handy reference for programmers of all levels.

"This cookbook fills a serious information gap. It is intended to capture the wealth of knowledge in the Python community, make it easily accessible, and make it even easier to program in Python," said Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState. "Since this is a community creation, we want to make sure the community receives the benefits and will therefore donate 5% of the proceeds to the Python Software Foundation."

"Ever since I developed 'Unix Power Tools' in 1993 I've wanted to collect the knowledge of a community," said Tim O’Reilly, Founder and President, O’Reilly & Associates. "The 'Python Cookbook' is modeled after the bestselling 'Perl Cookbook', but rather than relying on only a few authors, with ActiveState's support, we can build this book in an open collaborative process that involves anyone who has something to contribute."

Many of the best minds in Python contributing to the Python Cookbook, including Python Creator Guido van Rossum, are:

  • Image & Scientific Data Processing – Dr. David Ascher, co-author Learning Python
  • Extending & Embedding – David Beazley, University of Chicago
  • System Administration – Donn Cave, University of Washington
  • Programs about Programs – Paul Dubois, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
  • Debugging & Testing – Mark Hammond, co-author Python Programming on Win32
  • Distributed Programming – Jeremy Hylton, PythonLabs
  • CGI Programming – Andrew Kuchling, MEMS Exchange
  • User Interfaces – Fredrik Lundh, SecretLabs AB (PythonWare)
  • Files – Mark Lutz, author of Programming Python and co-author Learning Python
  • Object Oriented Programming – Alex Martelli, author of forthcoming Python in a Nutshell
  • Searching, Sorting & Algorithms – Tim Peters, PythonLabs
  • Processing XML – Paul Prescod, author XML Handbook
  • Web Programming – Eric Raymond, author The Cathedral and the Bazaar
  • Text – Andy Robinson, co-author Python Programming on Win32
  • Network Resources – Guido van Rossum, Python creator
  • Jython – Barry Warsaw, PythonLabs
  • Databases & Persistence – Dr. Aaron Watters, co-author Internet Programming with Python
  • Threads, Processes Synchronization – Dr. Greg Wilson, contributing editor Dr. Dobbs

"This book builds on the ‘batteries included’ philosophy of Python," said Dr. David Ascher, Python Cookbook Editor and Senior Developer, ActiveState. "This is going to be a living document of reviewed Python recipes for all aspects of Python programming. It will allow everyone to contribute towards the creation of a broad set of recipes that Python programmers will be able to use daily."

For more information and to submit a recipe go here.

About Dr. David Ascher

David is the Komodo IDE Technology Lead at ActiveState and is a key figure in the Python community. He is co-author of Learning Python, published by O'Reilly. Additionally, he is a Python trainer and frequent speaker at conferences and is on the organizing committee for the 2001 O'Reilly Open Source Convention and the 9th International Python Conference. On the software side, he helps support and document the Numeric Python extensions and maintained the PyOpenGL extension. David holds a B.Sc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, both from Brown University.