Book Image

Modular Programming with Python

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Modular Programming with Python

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Python has evolved over the years and has become the primary choice of developers in various fields. The purpose of this book is to help readers develop readable, reliable, and maintainable programs in Python. Starting with an introduction to the concept of modules and packages, this book shows how you can use these building blocks to organize a complex program into logical parts and make sure those parts are working correctly together. Using clearly written, real-world examples, this book demonstrates how you can use modular techniques to build better programs. A number of common modular programming patterns are covered, including divide-and-conquer, abstraction, encapsulation, wrappers and extensibility. You will also learn how to test your modules and packages, how to prepare your code for sharing with other people, and how to publish your modules and packages on GitHub and the Python Package Index so that other people can use them. Finally, you will learn how to use modular design techniques to be a more effective programmer.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Modular Programming with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Modules and packages


By now, you should be fairly comfortable with organizing your Python code into modules and then importing and using these modules in other modules and programs. This is only a taste of what can be done, however. Let's briefly review what Python modules and packages are before looking closer at how they work.

As we have seen, a module is simply a Python source file. You can import the module using the import statement:

import my_module

Once this is done, you can refer to any functions, classes, variables, and other definitions within the module by prepending the module name to the item, for example:

my_module.do_something()
print(my_module.variable)

In Chapter 1, Introducing Modular Programming, we learned that a Python package is a directory containing a special file named __init__.py. This is called the package initialization file and identifies the directory as a Python package. The package also typically contains one or more Python modules, for example:

To import the modules...