Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By : Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham

Overview of this book

Experienced programmers want to know how to enhance their craft and we want to help them start as apprentices with Python. We know that before mastering Python you need to learn the culture and the tools to become a productive member of any Python project. Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to Python programming, providing you with the insight and technical craftsmanship you need to be a productive member of any Python project. Python is a big language, and it’s not our intention with this book to cover everything there is to know. We just want to make sure that you, as the developer, know the tools, basic idioms and of course the ins and outs of the language, the standard library and other modules to be able to jump into most projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
Afterword – Just the Beginning

Summary


  • Tuples are immutable sequence types

    • Literal syntax is optional parentheses around a comma-separated list.

    • Notable syntax for single element tuples utilizing the trailing comma.

    • Tuple unpacking - useful for multiple return values and swapping

  • Strings

    • String concatenation is most efficiently performed with the join() method rather than the addition or augmented assignment operators.

    • The partition() method is a useful and elegant string parsing tool.

    • The format() method provided a powerful means of replacing placeholders with stringified values.

  • Ranges

    • The range objects represent arithmetic progressions.

    • The enumerate() built-in function is often a superior alternative to range() for generating loop counters

  • Lists

    • Lists support indexing from the end of the list with negative indices

    • Slice syntax allows us to copy all, or part, of a list.

    • The full slice is a common Python idiom for copying lists, although the copy() method and list() constructor are less obscure.

    • List (and other collection) copies...