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

Managing global and singleton objects


The Python environment contains a number of implicit global objects. These objects provide a convenient way to work with a collection of other objects. Because the collection is implicit, we're saved from the annoyance of an explicit initialization code.

One example of this is an implicit random number generating object that's part of the random module. When we evaluate random.random(), we're actually making use of an instance of the random.Random class that's an implicit part of the random module.

Other examples of this include the following:

  • The collection of numeric types available. By default, we only have int, float, and complex. We can, however, add more numeric types, and they will work seamlessly with existing types. There's a global registry of available numeric types.
  • The collection of data code/decode methods (codecs) available. The codecs module lists the available encoders and decoders. This also involves an implicit registry. We can add encodings...