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

Decorators – Enabling Code Reuse by Decorating

In this chapter, you are going to learn about Python decorators. The previous chapters have already shown the usage of a few decorators, but you will now find out more about them. Decorators are essentially function/class wrappers that can be used to modify the input, output, or even the function/class itself before executing it. This type of wrapping can just as easily be achieved by having a separate function that calls the inner function, or via inheriting small feature classes commonly called mixins. As is the case with many Python constructs, decorators are not the only way to reach the goal but are definitely convenient in many cases.

While you can get along fine without knowing too much about decorators, they give you a lot of “reuse power” and are therefore used heavily in framework libraries such as web frameworks. Python actually comes bundled with some useful decorators, most notably the @property,...