his book documents the API used by C and C++ programmers who want to write extension modules or embed Python. It is a companion to extending-index, which describes the general principles of extension writing but does not document the API functions in detail.
This book is a paper version of the freely available electronic documentation of the python project.

This book describes how to write modules in C or C++ to extend the Python interpreter with new modules. Those modules can not only define new functions but also new object types and their methods. The document also describes how to embed the Python interpreter in another application, for use as an extension language. Finally, it shows how to compile and link extension modules so that they can be loaded dynamically (at run time) into the interpreter, if the underlying operating system supports this feature. This book assumes basic knowledge about Python.
This book is a paper version of...

This reference manual describes the syntax and "core semantics" of the language. It is terse, but attempts to be exact and complete.
This book is a paper version of the freely available electronic documentation of the python project.

If you do much work on computers, eventually you find that there's some task you'd like to automate. For example, you may wish to perform a search-and-replace over a large number of text files, or rename and rearrange a bunch of photo files in a complicated way. Perhaps you'd like to write a small custom database, or a specialized GUI application, or a simple game.
If you're a professional software developer, you may have to work with several C/C++/Java libraries but find the usual write/compile/test/re-compile cycle is too slow. Perhaps you're writing a test suite for such a library and...