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

map, zip, and filter

We'll start by reviewing map, filter, and zip, which are the main built-in functions one can employ when handling collections, and then we'll learn how to achieve the same results using two very important constructs: comprehensions and generators. Fasten your seat belt!

map

According to the official Python documentation:

map(function, iterable, ...) returns an iterator that applies function to every item of iterable, yielding the results. If additional iterable arguments are passed, function must take that many arguments and is applied to the items from all iterables in parallel. With multiple iterables, the iterator stops when the shortest iterable is exhausted.

We will explain the concept of yielding later on in the chapter. For now, let's translate this into code: we'll use a lambda function that takes a variable number of positional arguments, and just returns them as a tuple. Also, as map returns an iterator, we'll need to wrap each call...