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

Decorating classes

Python 2.6 introduced the class decorator syntax. As is the case with the function decorator syntax, this is not really a new technique either. Even without the syntax, a class can be decorated simply by executing DecoratedClass = decorator(RegularClass). After the previous sections, you should be familiar with writing decorators. Class decorators are no different from regular ones, except for the fact that they take a class instead of a function. As is the case with functions, this happens at declaration time and not at instantiating/calling time.

Because there are quite a few alternative ways to modify how classes work, such as standard inheritance, mixins, and metaclasses (read more in Chapter 8, Metaclasses – Making Classes (Not Instances) Smarter), class decorators are never strictly needed. This does not reduce their usefulness, but it does offer an explanation of why you will most likely not see too many examples of class decorating in the wild...