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

Why use functions?

Functions are among the most important concepts and constructs of any language, so let me give you a few reasons why we need them:

  • They reduce code duplication in a program. By having a specific task taken care of by a nice block of packaged code that we can import and call whenever we want, we don't need to duplicate its implementation.
  • They help in splitting a complex task or procedure into smaller blocks, each of which becomes a function.
  • They hide the implementation details from their users.
  • They improve traceability.
  • They improve readability.

Let's look at a few examples to get a better understanding of each point.

Reduce code duplication

Imagine that you are writing a piece of scientific software, and you need to calculate primes up to a limit, as we did in the previous chapter. You write several algorithms and prime numbers, being the basis of many different types of calculations, keep creeping into your code. Well, you have a nice algorithm to calculate them...