Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Reading JSON and YAML documents

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a popular syntax for serializing data. For details, see http://json.org. Python includes the json module in order to serialize and deserialize data in this notation.

JSON documents are used widely by web applications. It's common to exchange data between RESTful web clients and servers using documents in JSON notation. These two tiers of the application stack communicate via JSON documents sent via the HTTP protocol.

The YAML format is a more sophisticated and flexible extension to JSON notation. For details, see https://yaml.org. Any JSON document is also a valid YAML document. The reverse is not true: YAML syntax is more complex and includes constructs that are not valid JSON.

To use YAML, an additional module has to be installed. The PyYAML project offers a yaml module that is popular and works well. See https://pypi.org/project/PyYAML/.

In this recipe, we'll use the json or yaml...