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

Forcing keyword-only arguments with the * separator

There are some situations where we have a large number of positional parameters for a function. Perhaps we've followed the Designing functions with optional parameters recipe and that led us to designing a function with so many parameters that it gets confusing.

Pragmatically, a function with more than about three parameters can be confusing. A great deal of conventional mathematics seems to focus on one and two-parameter functions. There don't seem to be too many common mathematical operators that involve three or more operands.

When it gets difficult to remember the required order for the parameters, there are too many parameters.

Getting ready

We'll look at a function that has a large number of parameters. We'll use a function that prepares a wind-chill table and writes the data to a CSV format output file.

We need to provide a range of temperatures, a range of wind speeds...