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

Designing a main script and the __main__ module

A top-level main script will execute our application. In some cases, we may have multiple main scripts because our application does several things. We have three general approaches to writing the top-level main script:

  • For very small applications, we can run the application with python3 some_script.py. This is the style that we've shown you in most examples.
  • For some larger applications, we'll have one or more files that we mark as executable with the OS chmod +x command. We can put these executable files into Python's scripts directory with our setup.py installation. We run these applications with some_script.py at the command line.
  • For complex applications, we might add a __main__.py module in the application's package. To provide a tidy interface, the standard library offers the runpy module and the -m command...