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
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17
Index

Using logging for control and audit output

In the Designing scripts for composition recipe earlier in this chapter, we examined three aspects of an application:

  • Gathering input
  • Producing output
  • The essential processing that connects input and output

There are several different kinds of output that applications produce:

  • The main output that helps a user make a decision or take action
  • Control information that confirms that the program worked completely and correctly
  • Audit summaries that are used to track the history of state changes in persistent databases
  • Any error messages that indicate why the application didn't work

It's less than optimal to lump all of these various aspects into print() requests that write to standard output. Indeed, it can lead to confusion because too many different outputs are interleaved in a single stream.

The OS provides each running process with two output files, standard...