Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Group-by reduction from many items to fewer


A very common operation is a reduction that groups values by some key or indicator. In SQL, this is often called the SELECT GROUP BY operation. The raw data is grouped by some column's value and reductions (sometimes aggregate functions) are applied to other columns. The SQL aggregate functions include SUM, COUNT, MAX, and MIN.

The statistical summary, called the mode, is a count that's grouped by some independent variable. Python offers us several ways to group data before computing a reduction of the grouped values. We'll start by looking at two ways to get simple counts of grouped data. Then we'll look at ways to compute different summaries of grouped data.

We'll use the trip data that we computed in Chapter 4, Working with Collections. This data started as a sequence of latitude-longitude waypoints. We restructured it to create legs represented by three tuples of start, end, and distance for the leg. The data looks as follows:

(((37.5490162, ...