Book Image

Modular Programming with Python

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Modular Programming with Python

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Python has evolved over the years and has become the primary choice of developers in various fields. The purpose of this book is to help readers develop readable, reliable, and maintainable programs in Python. Starting with an introduction to the concept of modules and packages, this book shows how you can use these building blocks to organize a complex program into logical parts and make sure those parts are working correctly together. Using clearly written, real-world examples, this book demonstrates how you can use modular techniques to build better programs. A number of common modular programming patterns are covered, including divide-and-conquer, abstraction, encapsulation, wrappers and extensibility. You will also learn how to test your modules and packages, how to prepare your code for sharing with other people, and how to publish your modules and packages on GitHub and the Python Package Index so that other people can use them. Finally, you will learn how to use modular design techniques to be a more effective programmer.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Modular Programming with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we used modular programming techniques to implement a hypothetical chart-generation package called Charter. We saw how charts are made up of standard elements, and how this organization can be translated into program code. After successfully creating a working chart-generation library that renders charts as bitmapped images, we saw how a fundamental change in requirements can seem to be a problem at first, but is actually an opportunity to refactor and improve your code.

Following through with this hypothetical example, we refactored the Charter library to handle PDF formatted charts. In doing so, we learned that using modular techniques to respond to a major change in requirements can help to isolate the changes that need to be made, and that refactoring our code often results in a system that is better organized, more expandable and more robust than what we started with.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to use standard modular programming "patterns" to deal...