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.

You've probably written dozens of Bash scripts by now. You may have used grep in a conditional statement or sed to transform small blocks of text inline. What if I told you that's incredibly ...

Wildcards have been around forever. Some even claim they appear in the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians. Wildcards allow you to specify succinctly a pattern that matches a set of filenames (for ...