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

Introduction

The idea of functional programming is to focus on writing small, expressive functions that perform the required data transformations. Combinations of functions can often create code that is more succinct and expressive than long strings of procedural statements or the methods of complex, stateful objects. This chapter focuses on functional programming features of Python more than procedural or object-oriented programming.

This provides an avenue for software design distinct from the strictly object-oriented approach used elsewhere in this book. The combination of objects with functions permits flexibility in assembling an optimal collection of components.

Conventional mathematics defines many things as functions. Multiple functions can be combined to build up a complex result from previous transformations. When we think of mathematical operators as functions, an expression like , can be expressed as two separate functions. We might think of this as and . We can...