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

Don't overdo comprehensions and generators


We've seen how powerful list comprehensions and generator expressions can be. And they are, don't get me wrong, but the feeling that I have when I deal with them is that their complexity grows exponentially. The more you try to do within a single comprehension or a generator expression, the harder it becomes to read, understand, and therefore to maintain or change.

Open a Python console and type in import this, let's read the Zen of Python again, in particular, there are a few lines that I think are very important to keep in mind:

>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.  #
Simple is better than complex.  #
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.  #
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced...