Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

By : Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé
Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

By: Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language that's used in a wide range of domains thanks to its simple yet powerful nature. Although writing Python code is easy, making it readable, reusable, and easy to maintain is challenging. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, the third edition of Expert Python Programming will help you overcome this challenge. The book will start by taking you through the new features in Python 3.7. You'll then learn the advanced components of Python syntax, in addition to understanding how to apply concepts of various programming paradigms, including object-oriented programming, functional programming, and event-driven programming. This book will also guide you through learning the naming best practices, writing your own distributable Python packages, and getting up to speed with automated ways to deploy your software on remote servers. You’ll discover how to create useful Python extensions with C, C++, Cython, and CFFI. Furthermore, studying about code management tools, writing clear documentation, and exploring test-driven development will help you write clean code. By the end of the book, you will have become an expert in writing efficient and maintainable Python code.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Before You Start
4
Section 2: Python Craftsmanship
12
Section 3: Quality over Quantity
16
Section 4: Need for Speed
20
Section 5: Technical Architecture
23
reStructuredText Primer

Supplemental data types and containers

In the Python's built-in types section, we concentrated mostly on those data types that have dedicated literals in the Python syntax. These were also the types that are implemented at the interpreter-level. However, Python's standard library offers a great collection of supplemental data types that can be effectively used in places where the basic built-in types show their shortcomings, or places where the nature of the data requires specialized handling (for example, in the presentation of time and dates).

The most common are data containers that are found in the collections, and we have already briefly mentioned two of them: deque and OrderedDict. However, the landscape of data structures available for Python programmers is enormous and almost every module of the Python standard library defines some specialized types for handling...