Book Image

Mastering Python 2E - Second Edition

By : Rick van Hattem
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Python 2E - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Rick van Hattem

Overview of this book

Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient, maintainable, and reusable is not so straightforward. Many of Python’s capabilities are underutilized even by more experienced programmers. Mastering Python, Second Edition, is an authoritative guide to understanding advanced Python programming so you can write the highest quality code. This new edition has been extensively revised and updated with exercises, four new chapters and updates up to Python 3.10. Revisit important basics, including Pythonic style and syntax and functional programming. Avoid common mistakes made by programmers of all experience levels. Make smart decisions about the best testing and debugging tools to use, optimize your code’s performance across multiple machines and Python versions, and deploy often-forgotten Python features to your advantage. Get fully up to speed with asyncio and stretch the language even further by accessing C functions with simple Python calls. Finally, turn your new-and-improved code into packages and share them with the wider Python community. If you are a Python programmer wanting to improve your code quality and readability, this Python book will make you confident in writing high-quality scripts and taking on bigger challenges
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
19
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20
Index

Debugging – Solving the Bugs

The previous chapter showed you how to add logging and tests to your code, but no matter how many tests you have, you will always have bugs. The biggest problem will always be external variables such as user input and different environments. At some point sooner or later, we will need to debug issues with our code, or worse, the code that was written by someone else.

There are many debugging techniques and, most certainly, you have already used a few of them. Within this chapter, we are going to focus on print/trace debugging and interactive debugging.

Debugging using print statements, stack traces, and logging is one of the most versatile methods to work with, and it is most likely the first type of debugging you ever used. Even a print('Hello world') can be considered this type, as the output will show you that your code is being executed correctly. There is obviously no point in explaining how and where to place print statements...