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

Functional programming

Functional programming is a paradigm that originates from the lambda calculus (λ-calculus), a formal system in mathematics that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. Without diving too much into the λ-calculus, this means that computation is performed using only the function arguments as input and that the output consists of a new variable without mutating the input variables. With a strictly functional programming language this behavior would be enforced, but since Python is not a strictly functional language, this doesn’t necessarily hold true.

It is still a good idea to adhere to this paradigm since mixing paradigms can cause unforeseen bugs, as discussed in Chapter 3, Pythonic Syntax and Common Pitfalls.

Purely functional

Purely functional programming expects functions to have no side effects. That means that arguments given to the function should not be mutated, and neither should any other external states. Let’...