Book Image

Learning Python

By : Romano
Book Image

Learning Python

By: 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 (14 chapters)
13
Index

Immutable sequences

Let's start with immutable sequences: strings, tuples, and bytes.

Strings and bytes

Textual data in Python is handled with str objects, more commonly known as strings. They are immutable sequences of unicode code points. Unicode code points can represent a character, but can also have other meanings, such as formatting data for example. Python, unlike other languages, doesn't have a char type, so a single character is rendered simply by a string of length 1. Unicode is an excellent way to handle data, and should be used for the internals of any application. When it comes to store textual data though, or send it on the network, you may want to encode it, using an appropriate encoding for the medium you're using. String literals are written in Python using single, double or triple quotes (both single or double). If built with triple quotes, a string can span on multiple lines. An example will clarify the picture:

>>> # 4 ways to make a string
>...