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

Case study


To tie together some of the principles presented in this chapter, let's build a mailing list manager. The manager will keep track of email addresses categorized into named groups. When it's time to send a message, we can pick a group and send the message to all email addresses assigned to that group.

Now, before we start working on this project, we ought to have a safe way to test it, without sending emails to a bunch of real people. Luckily, Python has our back here; like the test HTTP server, it has a built-in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server that we can instruct to capture any messages we send without actually sending them. We can run the server with the following command:

$python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

Running this command at command prompt will start an SMTP server running on port 1025 on the local machine. But we've instructed it to use the DebuggingServer class (this class comes with the built-in SMTP module), which, instead of sending mails...