January issue of Python Magazine now available for download

The January issue is live and ready for download from http://pymag.phparch.com/c/issue/view/66.

This month the cover article from Alex Martelli gives advice about how and when to use regular expressions for parsing text, and when to use other techniques instead.

Eugen Wintersberger has an excellent introduction to using ctypes. I’ve been looking forward to reviewing his article for a while now, so I’m glad to finally see it in print.

Dan Felts returns with an article about controlling the Nessus security scanner using Python to talk to it over the network.

In his Welcome to Python column this month Mark Mruss covers everything you need to know about iterators and generators.

And Steve Holden waxes philosophical about how, or whether, we should be marketing Python the language and platform.

I have two pieces in the mag this month. First, an article about treating your command line programs as objects by using CommandLineApp to define their options and argument processing. And my column starts the series I’ve mentioned on this blog previously by covering the wealth of testing tools available in Python.

It’s another good issue, and we’re already well into the work of producing the February edition as I write this. So go download the new issue and send your feedback to us via the pythonmagazine.com web site or in #pymag on irc.freenode.net.