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

Debugging techniques


In this part, I'll present you with the most common techniques, the ones I use most often, however, please don't consider this list to be exhaustive.

Debugging with print

This is probably the easiest technique of all. It's not very effective, it cannot be used everywhere and it requires access to both the source code and a terminal that will run it (and therefore show the results of the print function calls).

However, in many situations, this is still a quick and useful way to debug. For example, if you are developing a Django website and what happens in a page is not what would you expect, you can fill the view with prints and keep an eye on the console while you reload the page. I've probably done it a million times.

When you scatter calls to print in your code, you normally end up in a situation where you duplicate a lot of debugging code, either because you're printing a timestamp (like we did when we were measuring how fast list comprehensions and generators were),...