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

Reducing boilerplate with data classes

Before we dive deeper into details of Python classes, we will take a small detour. We will discuss a relatively new addition to the Python language, which are data classes. The dataclasses module, introduced in Python 3.7, provides a decorator and function that allows you to easily add generated special methods to your own classes.

Consider the following example. We are building a program that does some geometric computation and want to have a class that allows us to hold information about two-dimensional vectors. We will display the data of the vectors on the screen and perform common mathematical operations, such as addition, subtraction, and equality comparison. We already know that we can use special methods to achieve that goal. We can implement our Vector class as follows:

class Vector:
def __init__(self, x, y):
self.x = x...