Python 3 has so much more to offer than Python 2. Where to start?

Since a lot of those things are syntax changes, it’s a good starting point to learn about a lot of the syntax changes in Python 3. (e.g. print is now a function).

Python 2 had “strings” and “Unicode strings.” Python 3 has “bytes” and “strings.” That is, all strings are now Unicode strings, and if you want to deal with a bag of bytes, you use the new bytes type. Python 3 will never implicitly convert between strings and bytes, so if you’re not sure which one you have at any given moment, your code will almost certainly break. Read the Strings chapter for more details.

Bytes vs. strings comes up again and again throughout the course.

In Files, you’ll learn the difference between reading files in “binary” and “text” mode. Reading (and writing!) files in text mode requires an encoding parameter. Some text file methods count characters, but other methods count bytes. If your code assumes that one character == one byte, it will break on multi-byte characters.

In http Web Services, the httplib2 module fetches headers and data over http. http headers are returned as strings, but the http body is returned as bytes.

In Serializing Python Objects, you’ll learn why the pickle module in Python 3 defines a new data format that is backwardly incompatible with Python 2. (Hint: it’s because of bytes and strings.) Also, Python 3 supports serializing objects to and from Json, which doesn’t even have a byte type. I’ll show you how to hack around that.

In Case study: porting chardet to Python 3, it’s just a bloody mess of bytes and strings everywhere.

Even if you don’t care about Unicode (oh but you will), you’ll want to read about string formatting in Python 3, which is completely different from Python 2.

Iterators are everywhere in Python 3, and I understand them a lot better than I did five years ago when I wrote “Dive Into Python”. You need to understand them too, because lots of functions that used to return lists in Python 2 will now return iterators in Python 3. At a minimum, you should read the second half of the Iterators chapter and the second half of the Advanced Iterators chapter.

Putting It All Together