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

Leveraging Python's duck typing


Most of the time that a design involves inheritance, there's a clear relationship from a superclass to one or more subclasses. In the Choosing between inheritance and extension – the is-a question recipe of this chapter as well as the Extending a collection – a list that does statistics recipe in Chapter 6, Basics of Classes and Objects, we've looked at extensions that involve a proper subclass-superclass relationship.

Python doesn't have a formal mechanism for abstract superclasses. The standard library, however, has the abc module that supports the creation of abstract classes.

This isn't always necessary, however. Python relies on duck typing to locate methods within a class. This name comes from the quote:

"When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."

The quote is originally from James Whitcomb Riley. It's sometimes taken as a summary of abductive reasoning: we go from an observation to a...