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

Integrating command-line options and environment variables

The general policy for environment variables is to provide configuration inputs, similar to command-line options and arguments. For the most part, we use environment variables for settings that rarely change. We'll often set them via the .bashrc or .bash_profile files so that the values are set every time we log in. We may set the environment variables more globally in an /etc/bashrc file so that they apply to all users. We can also set environment variables on the command line, but these settings only apply to the program being run.

In some cases, all of our configuration settings can be provided on the command line. In this case, the environment variables could be used as a kind of backup syntax for slowly changing variables.

In other cases, the configuration values providing environment variables may be disconnected...