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

Alternative interpreters

Now that you have seen some of the features of the regular Python interpreter, let’s look at some enhanced alternatives. There are many options available, but we will limit ourselves to the most popular ones here:

  • bpython
  • ptpython
  • ipython
  • jupyter (web-based ipython)

Let’s get started.

bpython

The bpython interpreter is a curses interface for the Python interpreter that offers many useful features, while still being very similar to the regular Python interpreter.

The curses library allows you to create a fully functioning text-based user interface (TUI). A TUI gives you full control over where you want to write to the screen. The regular Python interpreter is a command-line interface (CLI), which normally only allows you to append to the screen. With a TUI, you can write to any position on the screen, making its features somewhat comparable to a graphical user interface (GUI).

Some...