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)
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Index

Pythonic patterns using advanced collections

The following collections are mostly just extensions of base collections; some of them are fairly simple, while others are a bit more advanced. For all of them, though, it is important to know the characteristics of the underlying structures. Without understanding them, it will be difficult to comprehend the characteristics of the collections.

There are a few collections that are implemented in native C code for performance reasons, but all of them can easily be implemented in pure Python as well. The following examples will show you not only the features and characteristics of these collections, but also a few example design patterns where they can be useful. Naturally, this is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you an idea of the possibilities.

Smart data storage with type hinting using dataclasses

One of the most useful recent additions to Python (since 3.5) is type hinting. With the type annotations, you can give...