Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great scripting language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, you can gain insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python. The recipes will benefit everyone ranging from beginner to an expert. The book is broken down into 13 chapters that build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. The recipes will touch upon all the necessary Python concepts related to data structures, OOP, functional programming, as well as statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively use the advantages that it offers. You will end the book equipped with the knowledge of testing, web services, and configuration and application integration tips and tricks. The recipes take a problem-solution approach to resolve issues commonly faced by Python programmers across the globe. You will be armed with the knowledge of creating applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, and command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Slicing and dicing a list


There are many times when we want to pick items from a list. One of the most common kinds of processing is to treat the first item of a list as a special case. This leads to a kind of head-tail processing where we treat the head of a list differently from the items in the tail of a list.

We can use these techniques to make a copy of a list, also.

Getting ready

We have a spreadsheet that was used to record fuel consumption on a large sailboat. It has rows which look like this:

date

engine on

fuel height

engine off

Other notes

10/25/2013

08:24

29

13:15

27

calm seas—anchor solomon's island

10/26/2013

09:12

27

18:25

22

choppy—anchor in jackson's creek

 

Fuel height? Yes. There's no float sensor to estimate the level of fuel in the tanks. Instead there's a sight-gauge that allows direct observation of the fuel. It's calibrated in inches of depth. For all practical purposes the tank is rectangular, so the depth shown can be converted to volume pretty easily—31 inches of depth is about 75 gallons...