It's ...

[Angus Rodgers]

... my first Python program!  So please be gentle (no fifty ton
weights on the head!), but tell me if it's properly "Pythonic",
or if it's a dead parrot (and if the latter, how to revive it).

I'm working from Beazley's /Python: Essential Reference/ (2nd
ed. 2001), so my first newbie question is how best to find out
what's changed from version 2.1 to version 2.5. (I've recently
installed 2.5.4 on my creaky old Win98SE system.) I expect to 
be buying the 4th edition when it comes out, which will be soon,
but before then, is there a quick online way to find this out?

Having only got up to page 84 - where we can actually start to
read stuff from the hard disk - I'm emboldened to try to learn
to do something useful, such as removing all those annoying hard
tab characters from my many old text files (before I cottoned on
to using soft tabs in my text editor).

This sort of thing seems to work, in the interpreter (for an 
ASCII text file, named 'h071.txt', in the current directory):

stop = 3   # Tab stops every 3 characters
from types import StringType   # Is this awkwardness necessary?
detab = lambda s : StringType.expandtabs(s, stop)  # Or use def
f = open('h071.txt')   # Do some stuff to f, perhaps, and then:
f.seek(0)
print ''.join(map(detab, f.xreadlines()))
f.close()

Obviously, to turn this into a generally useful program, I need
to learn to write to a new file, and how to parcel up the Python
code, and write a script to apply the "detab" function to all the
files found by searching a Windows directory, and replace the old
files with the new ones; but, for the guts of the program, is this
a reasonable way to write the code to strip tabs from a text file?

For writing the output file, this seems to work in the interpreter:

g = open('temp.txt', 'w')
g.writelines(map(detab, f.xreadlines()))
g.close()

In practice, does this avoid creating the whole string in memory
at one time, as is done by using ''.join()? (I'll have to read up
on "opaque sequence objects", which have only been mentioned once
or twice in passing - another instance perhaps being an xrange()?)
Not that that matters much in practice (in this simple case), but
it seems elegant to avoid creating the whole output file at once.

OK, I'm just getting my feet wet, and I'll try not to ask too many
silly questions!

First impressions are: (1) Python seems both elegant and practical;
and (2) Beazley seems a pleasantly unfussy introduction for someone 
with at least a little programming experience in other languages.

-- 
Angus Rodgers