Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great scripting language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, you can gain insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python. The recipes will benefit everyone ranging from beginner to an expert. The book is broken down into 13 chapters that build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. The recipes will touch upon all the necessary Python concepts related to data structures, OOP, functional programming, as well as statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively use the advantages that it offers. You will end the book equipped with the knowledge of testing, web services, and configuration and application integration tips and tricks. The recipes take a problem-solution approach to resolve issues commonly faced by Python programmers across the globe. You will be armed with the knowledge of creating applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, and command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Designing classes with little unique processing


In some cases, an object is a container of rather complex data, but doesn't really do very much processing on that data. Indeed, in many cases, a class can be designed that depends only on built-in Python features and doesn't require any unique method functions.

In many cases, Python's built-in container classes can cover almost all of the various use cases for us. The small problem is that the syntax for a dictionary or a list isn't quite so elegant as the syntax for attributes of an object.

How can we create a class that allows us to use object.attribute syntax instead of object['attribute']?

Getting ready

There are really only two cases for any kind of class design:

  • Is it stateless? Does it embody a number of attributes, but never changes?
  • Is it stateful? Will there be state changes for the various attributes?

A stateful design is slightly more general. We can always use a stateful implementation and avoid making any changes to the object to support...