Linguistic research increasingly relies on large electronic corpora for its primary data. While off-the-shelf programs can perform a set of standard searches, specialized questions usually require a custom-written program to find their answers. Essential Python for Corpus Linguistics uses the programming language Python to explain how to write simple programs that extract linguistically useful information, such as the frequency of a given utterance in a particular context within a corpus, or instances of certain phrasal structures in a Treebank. Assuming no prior programming background, the book provides numerous example programs that search for phonological, morphological and syntactic constructions in corpora, and the associated web site provides sample data and programs, which make it easy to start working independently. This book is a valuable resource for linguists who use corpus methods but have no programming training.