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

Exercises


If you haven't encountered the with statements and context managers before, I encourage you, as usual, to go through your old code, find all the places where you were opening files, and make sure they are safely closed using the with statement. Look for places to write your own context managers as well. Ugly or repetitive try...finally clauses are a good place to start, but you may find them useful any time you need to do before and/or after tasks in context.

You've probably used many of the basic built-in functions before now. We covered several of them, but didn't go into a great deal of detail. Play with enumerate, zip, reversed, any, and all, until you know you'll remember to use them when they are the right tool for the job. The enumerate function is especially important, because not using it results in some pretty ugly while loops.

Also explore some applications that pass functions around as callable objects, as well as using the __call__ method to make your own objects callable...