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
Other Books You May Enjoy
20
Index

Summary

This chapter showed you what the Pythonic philosophy is all about and some of the reasoning behind it. Additionally, you have learned about the Zen of Python and what is considered beautiful and ugly within the Python community. While code style is highly personal, Python has a few very helpful guidelines that at least keep people mostly on the same page and style.

In the end, we are all consenting adults; everyone has the right to write code as they sees fit. But I do request that you please read through the style guides and try to adhere to them unless you have a really good reason not to.

With all that power comes great responsibility, and a few pitfalls, though there aren’t too many. Some are tricky enough to fool me regularly and I’ve been writing Python for a long time! Python improves all the time though. Many pitfalls have been taken care of since Python 2, but some will always remain. For example, circular imports and definitions can easily...