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

Code style – What is Pythonic code?

When you first hear of Pythonic code, you might think it is a programming paradigm, similar to object-oriented or functional programming. It is actually more of a design philosophy. Python leaves you free to choose to program in an object-oriented, procedural, functional, aspect-oriented, or even logic-oriented way. These freedoms make Python a great language to write in, but they have the drawback of requiring more discipline to keep code clean and readable. PEP 8 tells us how to format code and PEP 20 is about style and how to write Pythonic code. PEP 20, the Pythonic philosophy, is about code that is:

  • Clean
  • Simple
  • Beautiful
  • Explicit
  • Readable

Most of these sound like common sense, and I think they should be. There are cases, however, where there is not a single obvious way to write your code (unless you’re Dutch, of course, as you’ll read later in this chapter). That is the goal...