Book Image

Python Object-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

By : Steven F. Lott, Dusty Phillips
2 (2)
Book Image

Python Object-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

2 (2)
By: Steven F. Lott, Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a popular design paradigm in which data and behaviors are encapsulated in such a way that they can be manipulated together. Python Object-Oriented Programming, Fourth Edition dives deep into the various aspects of OOP, Python as an OOP language, common and advanced design patterns, and hands-on data manipulation and testing of more complex OOP systems. These concepts are consolidated by open-ended exercises, as well as a real-world case study at the end of every chapter, newly written for this edition. All example code is now compatible with Python 3.9+ syntax and has been updated with type hints for ease of learning. Steven and Dusty provide a comprehensive, illustrative tour of important OOP concepts, such as inheritance, composition, and polymorphism, and explain how they work together with Python’s classes and data structures to facilitate good design. In addition, the book also features an in-depth look at Python’s exception handling and how functional programming intersects with OOP. Two very powerful automated testing systems, unittest and pytest, are introduced. The final chapter provides a detailed discussion of Python's concurrent programming ecosystem. By the end of the book, you will have a thorough understanding of how to think about and apply object-oriented principles using Python syntax and be able to confidently create robust and reliable programs.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Python Data Structures

In our examples so far, we've already seen many of the built-in Python data structures in action. You've probably also covered many of them in introductory books or tutorials. In this chapter, we'll discuss the object-oriented features of these data structures, when they should be used instead of a regular class, and when they should not be used. In particular, we'll be covering the following topics:

  • Tuples and named tuples
  • Dataclasses
  • Dictionaries
  • Lists and sets
  • Three types of queues

This chapter's case study will revisit the data model for the k-nearest neighbors classifier. After looking at Python's sophisticated built-in data structure and class definitions, we can simplify some of the application class definitions.

We'll start by looking at some of the foundational constructs. The object class, specifically.