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

Writing dictionary-related type hints

When we look at sets and lists, we generally expect each item within a list (or a set) to be the same type. When we look at object-oriented class designs, in Chapter 7, Basics of Classes and Objects, we'll see how a common superclass can be the common type for a closely related family of object types. While it's possible to have heterogeneous types in a list or set collection, it often becomes quite complex to process.

Dictionaries are used in a number of different ways.

  • Homogeneous types for values: This is common for dictionaries based on collections.Counter or collections.defaultdict. The input from a csv.DictReader will also be homogeneous, since every value from a CSV file is a string.
  • Heterogeneous types for values: This is common for dictionaries used to represent complex objects that have been serialized into JSON notation. It's also common for internal data structures created as part of more...