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

Importing objects


Now that you know a lot about functions, let's see how to use them. The whole point of writing functions is to be able to later reuse them, and this in Python translates to importing them into the namespace in which you need them. There are many different ways to import objects into a namespace, but the most common ones are just two: import module_name and from module_name import function_name. Of course, these are quite simplistic examples, but bear with me for the time being.

The form import module_name finds the module module_name and defines a name for it in the local namespace where the import statement is executed.

The form from module_name import identifier is a little bit more complicated than that, but basically does the same thing. It finds module_name and searches for an attribute (or a submodule) and stores a reference to identifier in the local namespace.

Both forms have the option to change the name of the imported object using the as clause, like this:

from mymodule...