Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By : Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By: Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

This Learning Path helps you get comfortable with the world of Python. It starts with a thorough and practical introduction to Python. You’ll quickly start writing programs, building websites, and working with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. With the power of linked lists, binary searches, and sorting algorithms, you'll easily create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. After understanding cooperative inheritance, you'll expertly raise, handle, and manipulate exceptions. You will effortlessly integrate the object-oriented and not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python, and create maintainable applications using higher level design patterns. Once you’ve covered core topics, you’ll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy it is to create unit tests. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have built components that are easy to understand, debug, and can be used across different applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learn Python Programming - Second Edition by Fabrizio Romano • Python Data Structures and Algorithms by Benjamin Baka • Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
8
Stacks and Queues
10
Hashing and Symbol Tables
Index

A note on IDEs


Just a few words about IDEs. To follow the examples in this book, you don't need one; any text editor will do fine. If you want to have more advanced features, such as syntax coloring and auto completion, you will have to fetch yourself an IDE. You can find a comprehensive list of open source IDEs (just Google Python IDEs) on the Python website. I personally use Sublime Text editor. It's free to try out and it costs just a few dollars. I have tried many IDEs in my life, but this is the one that makes me most productive.

Two important pieces of advice:

  • Whatever IDE you choose to use, try to learn it well so that you can exploit its strengths, but don't depend on it. Exercise yourself to work with VIM (or any other text editor) once in a while; learn to be able to do some work on any platform, with any set of tools.
  • Whatever text editor/IDE you use, when it comes to writing Python, indentation is four spaces. Don't use tabs, don't mix them with spaces. Use four spaces, not two, not three, not five. Just use four. The whole world works like that, and you don't want to become an outcast because you were fond of the three-space layout.