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

Useful decorators

In addition to the ones already mentioned in this chapter, Python comes bundled with a few other useful decorators. There are some that aren’t in the standard library (yet?).

Single dispatch – Polymorphism in Python

If you’ve used C++ or Java before, you’re probably used to having ad hoc polymorphism available—different functions being called depending on the argument types. Python being a dynamically typed language, most people would not expect the possibility of a single dispatch pattern. Python, however, is a language that is not only dynamically typed but also strongly typed, which means we can rely on the type we receive.

A dynamically typed language does not require strict type definitions. While a language such as C would require the following to declare an integer:

int some_integer = 123;

Python simply accepts that our value has a type:

some_integer = 123

Although with type hinting...