Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The itertools recipes


Within the itertools chapter of the Python library documentation, there's a subsection called Itertools Recipes, which contains outstanding examples of ways to use the various itertools functions. Since there's no reason to reproduce these, we'll reference them here. They should be considered as required reading on functional programming in Python.

Note

The 10.1.2 section, Itertools Recipes of Python Standard Library, is a wonderful resource. For more information visit: https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html#itertools-recipes.

It's important to note that these aren't importable functions in the itertools modules. A recipe needs to be read and understood and then, perhaps, copied or modified before it's included in an application.

The following table summarizes some of the recipes that show functional programming algorithms built from the itertools basics:

Function Name

Arguments

Results

take

(n, iterable)

This returns the first n items of the iterable as a list. This...