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

Picking an order for parameters based on partial functions

When we look at complex functions, we'll sometimes see a pattern in the ways we use the function. We might, for example, evaluate a function many times with some argument values that are fixed by context, and other argument values that are changing with the details of the processing.

It can simplify our programming if our design reflects this concern. We'd like to provide a way to make the common parameters slightly easier to work with than the uncommon parameters. We'd also like to avoid having to repeat the parameters that are part of a larger context.

Getting ready

We'll look at a version of the Haversine formula. This computes distances between two points, and , on the surface of the Earth, and :

The essential calculation yields the central angle, c, between two points. The angle is measured in radians. We convert it into distance by multiplying by the Earth's mean...