Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

By : Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé
Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

By: Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language that's used in a wide range of domains thanks to its simple yet powerful nature. Although writing Python code is easy, making it readable, reusable, and easy to maintain is challenging. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, the third edition of Expert Python Programming will help you overcome this challenge. The book will start by taking you through the new features in Python 3.7. You'll then learn the advanced components of Python syntax, in addition to understanding how to apply concepts of various programming paradigms, including object-oriented programming, functional programming, and event-driven programming. This book will also guide you through learning the naming best practices, writing your own distributable Python packages, and getting up to speed with automated ways to deploy your software on remote servers. You’ll discover how to create useful Python extensions with C, C++, Cython, and CFFI. Furthermore, studying about code management tools, writing clear documentation, and exploring test-driven development will help you write clean code. By the end of the book, you will have become an expert in writing efficient and maintainable Python code.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Before You Start
4
Section 2: Python Craftsmanship
12
Section 3: Quality over Quantity
16
Section 4: Need for Speed
20
Section 5: Technical Architecture
23
reStructuredText Primer

Test-Driven Development

Test-driven development (TDD) is a methodology that aims to produce high-quality software by concentrating on automated tests. It is widely used in the Python community, but it is also very popular in other communities.

Testing is especially important in Python due to its dynamic nature. Python lacks static typing, so many, even minute, errors won't be noticed until the code is run and each of its lines is executed. But the problem is not only how types in Python work. The most troublesome bugs are not related to bad syntax or wrong type usage, but rather to logical errors and subtle mistakes that may lead to major failures.

In order to efficiently test your software, you often need to use a wide variety of testing strategies that will be executed on different abstraction levels of your application. Unfortunately, not every testing strategy is suitable...