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

Using the standard library extensions

We'll look at some extensions to built-in classes that are already part of the standard library. These are the collections that extend or modify the built-in collections. Most of these are covered in one form or another in books such as Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition by Dusty Phillips.

We'll look at the following four collection from this library:

  • deque (note the atypical class name) is a double-ended queue, a list-like collection that can perform fast appends and pops on either end. A subset of the features of this class will create single-ended stacks or queues.
  • ChainMap is a view of multiple mappings. Instead of merging mappings together, we can keep them separate and chain among them to locate which mapping contains a requested key.
  • defaultdict (note the atypical spelling) is a dict subclass that uses...