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

Containers and collections

The collections module defines a number of collections above and beyond the built-in container classes. The container classes include namedtuple(), deque, ChainMap, Counter, OrderedDict, and defaultdict. All of these are examples of classes based on ABC definitions.

The following is a quick interaction to show how we can inspect collections to see the methods that they support:

>>> isinstance({}, collections.abc.Mapping) 
True 
>>> isinstance(collections.defaultdict(int), collections.abc.Mapping) 
True 

We can inspect the simple dict class to see that it follows the Mapping protocol and will support the required methods.

We can inspect a defaultdict collection to confirm that it is also part of the Mapping class hierarchy.

When creating a new kind of container, we have the following two general approaches:

  • Use the collections.abc classes...