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

Uploading your work to GitHub


GitHub (https://github.com/) is a popular web-based system for storing and managing source code. While there are several alternatives, GitHub is particularly popular with people writing and sharing open source Python code, and this is the source code management system that we will use in this book.

Before delving into the specifics of GitHub, let's start by looking at how source code management systems work in general and why you might want to use one.

Imagine that you are writing a complex module and have opened your module in a text editor to make a few changes. While making these changes, you accidentally select 100 lines of code and press the Delete key. Before you realize what you've done, you save and close the file. Too late: those 100 lines of text are gone.

Of course, you might (and hopefully will) have a backup system in place which keeps regular backups of your source files. But if you had made changes to some of the missing code in the past few minutes...