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

Being an effective programmer


Now that you have seen just how useful modular programming techniques are, you might wonder why anyone would not want to use them. Other than a lack of understanding, why would a programmer eschew modular principles and techniques?

The Python language has been designed from the ground up to support good modular programming techniques, and with the addition of excellent tools such as the Python Standard Library, unit tests, and docstrings, it encourages you to apply these techniques to your everyday programming practice. Similarly, the use of indentation to define the structure of your code automatically encourages you to write well-formatted source code where the indentation of your code reflects the logical organization of your program. These are not random choices: Python encourages good programming practices every step of the way.

Of course, just like you can write poorly structured and incomprehensible spaghetti code using Python, it is possible to avoid using...