Book Image

Mastering Object-Oriented Python - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Mastering Object-Oriented Python - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a relatively complex discipline to master, and it can be difficult to see how general principles apply to each language's unique features. With the help of the latest edition of Mastering Objected-Oriented Python, you'll be shown how to effectively implement OOP in Python, and even explore Python 3.x. Complete with practical examples, the book guides you through the advanced concepts of OOP in Python, and demonstrates how you can apply them to solve complex problems in OOP. You will learn how to create high-quality Python programs by exploring design alternatives and determining which design offers the best performance. Next, you'll work through special methods for handling simple object conversions and also learn about hashing and comparison of objects. As you cover later chapters, you'll discover how essential it is to locate the best algorithms and optimal data structures for developing robust solutions to programming problems with minimal computer processing. Finally, the book will assist you in leveraging various Python features by implementing object-oriented designs in your programs. By the end of this book, you will have learned a number of alternate approaches with different attributes to confidently solve programming problems in Python.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tighter Integration Via Special Methods
11
Section 2: Object Serialization and Persistence
17
Section 3: Object-Oriented Testing and Debugging

Handling more literals via the eval() variants

A configuration file may have values of types that don't have simple string representations. For example, a collection might be provided as a tuple or a list literal; a mapping might be provided as a dict literal. We have several choices to handle these more complex values.

The choices resolve the issue of how much Python syntax the conversion is able to tolerate. For some types (int, float, bool, complex, decimal.Decimal, and fractions.Fraction), we can safely convert the string to a literal value because the __init__() object for these types can handle string values.

For other types, however, we can't simply do the string conversion. We have several choices on how to proceed:

  • Forbid these data types and rely on the configuration file syntax plus processing rules to assemble complex Python values from very simple parts...