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)

First approach – scripting

Now, let's start writing the script. I'll go through the source in three steps: imports, arguments parsing, and business logic.

The imports

Here's how the script starts:

# scrape.py
import argparse
import base64
import json
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

Going through them from the top, you can see that we'll need to parse the arguments, which we'll feed to the script itself (argparse). We will need the base64 library to save the images within a JSON file (json), and we'll need to open files for writing (os). Finally, we'll need BeautifulSoup for scraping the web page easily, and requests to fetch its content. I assume you're familiar...