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

ABCs of numbers

The numbers package provides a tower of numeric types that are all implementations of numbers.Number. Additionally, the fractions and decimal modules provide extension numeric types: fractions.Fraction and decimal.Decimal. These definitions roughly parallel the mathematical thought on the various classes of numbers. An article available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_theory contains numerous links to in-depth explanations; for example, An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers.

The essential question is how well computers can implement the underlying mathematical abstractions. To be more specific, we want to be sure that anything that is computable in the abstract world of mathematics can be computed (or approximated) using a concrete computer. This is why the question of computability is so important. The idea behind a Turing complete programming language...