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

Creating a new kind of mapping

Python has a built-in mapping called dict, and numerous library mappings. In addition to the collections module extensions to dict (defaultdict, Counter, and ChainMap), there are several other library modules that contain mapping-like structures.

The shelve module is an important example of another mapping. We'll look at this in Chapter 11, Storing and Retrieving Objects via Shelve. The dbm module is similar to shelve, in that it also maps a key to a value.

The mailbox module and email.message modules both have classes that provide an interface that is similar to dict for the mailbox structure used to manage local e-mails.

As far as design strategies go, we can extend or wrap one of the existing mappings to add even more features.

We could upgrade Counter to add the mean and standard deviation to the data stored as a frequency distribution....