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

Documenting code

There are currently three different documentation styles supported by Sphinx: the original Sphinx style and the more recent NumPy and Google styles. The differences between them are mainly in style, but it’s actually slightly more than that.

The Sphinx style was developed using a bunch of reStructuredText roles, a very effective method, but it can be detrimental for readability when used a lot. You can probably tell what the following does, but it’s not the nicest syntax:

:param number: The number of eggs to return
:type number: int

The Google style was (as the name suggests) developed by Google. The goal was to have a simple/readable format that works both as in-code documentation and is parseable for Sphinx. In my opinion, it comes closer to the original idea of reStructuredText, a format that’s very close to how you would document instinctively. This example has the same meaning as the Sphinx style example shown earlier...