I find regular expressions (regexes) extremely useful. Some people love to bring up the quote "now they have two problems" whenever regexes are brought up. I think that quote is appropriate sometimes, but in many cases, regexes replace much larger sections of code and are much more readable and much less complex than said code.

Python is "that language with the whitespace rules." In particular, what that means is that code blocks are defined by indentation. Which seems weird and annoying, until you try to read somebody else's program and the meaning just slides quite painlessly right on into your cerebral cortex, almost effortlessly. So yeah. And, to quote Bruce Eckel,

With Python, it has always felt like the designers were saying, "We're trying to make your life easier, and that's it. Making your life easier is the thing that we're not compromising on."

That's why I'm learning Python, because most of what I (and probably most programmers today) do is edit other people's code. I want that to be as easy as possible.

Oracle is the database I use at work. I figured it'd be good to know more about it. Hence the book.