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

Simplifying complex algorithms with immutable data structures

The concept of a stateful object is a common feature of object-oriented programming. We looked at a number of techniques related to objects and state in Chapter 7, Basics of Classes and Objects, and Chapter 8, More Advanced Class Design. A great deal of the emphasis of object-oriented design is creating methods that mutate an object's state.

When working with JSON or CSV files, we'll often be working with objects that have a Python dict object that defines the attributes. Using a dict object to store an object's attributes has several consequences:

  • We can trivially add and remove new attributes to the dictionary. We're not limited to simply setting and getting defined attributes. This makes it difficult for mypy to check our design carefully. The TypedDict type hint suggests a narrow domain of possible key values, but it doesn't prevent runtime use of unexpected keys.
  • ...