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

Designing type hints for optional parameters

This recipe combines the two previous recipes. It's common to define functions with fairly complex options and then add type hints around those definitions. For atomic types like strings and integers, it can make sense to write a function first, and then add type hints to the function.

In later chapters, when we look at more complex data types, it often makes more sense to create the data type definitions first, and then define the functions (or methods) related to those types. This philosophy of type first is one of the foundations for object-oriented programming.

Getting ready

We'll look at the two dice-based games, Craps and Zonk. In the Craps game, the players will be rolling two dice. In the Zonk game, they'll roll a number of dice, varying from one to six. The games have a common, underlying requirement to be able to create collections of dice. As noted in the Designing functions with optional parameters...