Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

If you work with strings in your Python scripts and you're writing obscure logic to process them, then you need to look into ...

But in many cases, it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. Properly optimized, Python applications can run with surprising speed—perhaps not as fast as Java or C, but fast enough for web ...