Book Image

Learning Python

By : Fabrizio Romano
Book Image

Learning Python

By: Fabrizio Romano

Overview of this book

Learning Python has a dynamic and varied nature. It reads easily and lays a good foundation for those who are interested in digging deeper. It has a practical and example-oriented approach through which both the introductory and the advanced topics are explained. Starting with the fundamentals of programming and Python, it ends by exploring very different topics, like GUIs, web apps and data science. The book takes you all the way to creating a fully fledged application. The book begins by exploring the essentials of programming, data structures and teaches you how to manipulate them. It then moves on to controlling the flow of a program and writing reusable and error proof code. You will then explore different programming paradigms that will allow you to find the best approach to any situation, and also learn how to perform performance optimization as well as effective debugging. Throughout, the book steers you through the various types of applications, and it concludes with a complete mini website built upon all the concepts that you learned.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning Python
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Numbers


Let's start by exploring Python's built-in data types for numbers. Python was designed by a man with a master's degree in mathematics and computer science, so it's only logical that it has amazing support for numbers.

Numbers are immutable objects.

Integers

Python integers have unlimited range, subject only to the available virtual memory. This means that it doesn't really matter how big a number you want to store: as long as it can fit in your computer's memory, Python will take care of it. Integer numbers can be positive, negative, and 0 (zero). They support all the basic mathematical operations, as shown in the following example:

>>> a = 12
>>> b = 3
>>> a + b  # addition
15
>>> b - a  # subtraction
-9
>>> a // b  # integer division
4
>>> a / b  # true division
4.0
>>> a * b  # multiplication
36
>>> b ** a  # power operator
531441
>>> 2 ** 1024  # a very big number, Python handles it gracefully
17976931348623159077293051907890247336179769789423065727343008115...