In the previous chapter, we covered a third creational pattern, that is, builder, which offers a nice way of creating the various parts of a complex object. Besides the factory method, the abstract factory, and the builder patterns covered so far, there are other creational patterns that are interesting to discuss, such as the prototype pattern and the singleton pattern.
What is the prototype pattern? The prototype pattern is useful when one needs to create objects based on an existing object by using a cloning technique.
As you may have guessed, the idea is to use a copy of that object's complete structure to produce the new object. We will see that this is almost natural in Python because we have a copy feature that helps greatly in using this technique.
What is the singleton pattern? The singleton pattern offers a way to implement a class from which you can only create one object, hence the name singleton. As you will understand with our exploration...