Book Image

Learn Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Fabrizio Romano
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Learn Python Programming - Second Edition

4.5 (2)
By: Fabrizio Romano

Overview of this book

Learn Python Programming is a quick, thorough, and practical introduction to Python - an extremely flexible and powerful programming language that can be applied to many disciplines. Unlike other books, it doesn't bore you with elaborate explanations of the basics but gets you up-and-running, using the language. You will begin by learning the fundamentals of Python so that you have a rock-solid foundation to build upon. You will explore the foundations of Python programming and learn how Python can be manipulated to achieve results. Explore different programming paradigms and find the best approach to a situation; understand how to carry out performance optimization and effective debugging; control the flow of a program; and utilize an interchange format to exchange data. You'll also walk through cryptographic services in Python and understand secure tokens. Learn Python Programming will give you a thorough understanding of the Python language. You'll learn how to write programs, build websites, and work with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. Filled with real-world examples and projects, the book covers various types of applications, and concludes by building real-world projects based on the concepts you have learned.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Guidelines on how to write good code

Writing good code is not as easy as it seems. As I already said before, good code exposes a long list of qualities that is quite hard to put together. Writing good code is, to some extent, an art. Regardless of where on the path you will be happy to settle, there is something that you can embrace which will make your code instantly better: PEP 8.

According to Wikipedia:

"Python's development is conducted largely through the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process. The PEP process is the primary mechanism for proposing major new features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python."

PEP 8 is perhaps the most famous of all PEPs. It lays out a simple but effective set of guidelines to define Python aesthetics so that we write beautiful Python code. If you take one suggestion out of this chapter, please let it be this: use it. Embrace it. You will thank me later.

Coding today is no longer a check-in/check-out business. Rather, it's more of a social effort. Several developers collaborate on a piece of code through tools such as Git and Mercurial, and the result is code that is fathered by many different hands.

Git and Mercurial are probably the distributed revision control systems that are most used today. They are essential tools designed to help teams of developers collaborate on the same software.

These days, more than ever, we need to have a consistent way of writing code, so that readability is maximized. When all developers of a company abide by PEP 8, it's not uncommon for any of them landing on a piece of code to think they wrote it themselves. It actually happens to me all the time (I always forget the code I write).

This has a tremendous advantage: when you read code that you could have written yourself, you read it easily. Without a convention, every coder would structure the code the way they like most, or simply the way they were taught or are used to, and this would mean having to interpret every line according to someone else's style. It would mean having to lose much more time just trying to understand it. Thanks to PEP 8, we can avoid this. I'm such a fan of it that I won't sign off a code review if the code doesn't respect it. So, please take the time to study it; it's very important.

In the examples in this book, I will try to respect it as much as I can. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of 79 characters (which is the maximum line length suggested by PEP 8), and I will have to cut down on blank lines and other things, but I promise you I'll try to lay out my code so that it's as readable as possible.