Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Michał Jaworski
Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Michał Jaworski

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language, used in a wide range of domains by programmers who find it simple, yet powerful. Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is a challenge. The focus of the book is to familiarize you with common conventions, best practices, useful tools and standards used by python professionals on a daily basis when working with code. You will begin with knowing new features in Python 3.5 and quick tricks for improving productivity. Next, you will learn advanced and useful python syntax elements brought to this new version. Using advanced object-oriented concepts and mechanisms available in python, you will learn different approaches to implement metaprogramming. You will learn to choose good names, write packages, and create standalone executables easily. You will also be using some powerful tools such as buildout and vitualenv to release and deploy the code on remote servers for production use. Moving on, you will learn to effectively create Python extensions with C, C++, cython, and pyrex. The important factors while writing code such as code management tools, writing clear documentation, and test-driven development are also covered. You will now dive deeper to make your code efficient with general rules of optimization, strategies for finding bottlenecks, and selected tools for application optimization. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in writing efficient and maintainable code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Expert Python Programming Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Syntax Best Practices – above the Class Level

We will now focus on syntax best practices for classes. It is not intended to cover design patterns here, as they will be discussed in Chapter 14, Useful Design Patterns. This chapter gives an overview of the advanced Python syntax to manipulate and enhance the class code.

Object model evolved greatly during history of Python 2. For a long time we lived in a world where two implementations of the object-oriented programming paradigm coexisted in the same language. These two models were simply referred to as old-style and new-style classes. Python 3 ended this dichotomy and only model known as new-style classes is available to the developers. Anyway, it is still important to know how both of them worked in Python 2 because it will help you in porting old code and writing backwards compatible applications. Knowing how the object model changed will also help you in understanding why it is designed that way right now. This is the reason...