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 dataclasses for mutable objects

There are two cases for any kind of class design:

  • Is it stateless (immutable)? Does it embody attributes with values that never change? If so, see the Using typing.NamedTuple for immutable objects recipe for a way to build class definitions for stateless objects.
  • Is it stateful (mutable)? Will there be state changes for one or more attributes? In this case, we can either build a class from the ground up, or we can leverage the @dataclass decorator to create a class definition from a few attributes and type hints.

Getting ready

We'll look closely at a stateful object that holds a hand of cards. Cards can be inserted into a hand and removed from a hand. In a game like Cribbage, the hand has a number of state changes. Initially, six cards are dealt to both players. The players will each place a pair of cards in a special pile, called the crib. The remaining four cards are played alternately to create scoring...