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

The Python interpreter

The standard Python interpreter is already fairly powerful, but more options are available through customization. First, let’s start with a 'Hello world!'. Because the interpreter uses REPL, all output will be automatically printed and we can simply create a string.

Sometimes interactive interpreters are referred to as REPL. This stands for Read-Eval-Print-Loop. This effectively means that all of your statements will be executed and printed to your screen immediately.

First, we need to start the interpreter; after that, we can type our commands:

$ python3
Python 3.9.0
[GCC 7.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 'Hello world!'
'Hello world!'

That was easy enough. And note that we didn’t have to use print('Hello world!') to show the output.

Many interpreters have only...