Book Image

Python Object-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

By : Steven F. Lott, Dusty Phillips
2 (1)
Book Image

Python Object-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

2 (1)
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

Tuples and named tuples

Tuples are objects that can store a specific number of other objects in sequence. They are immutable, meaning we can't add, remove, or replace objects on the fly. This may seem like a massive restriction, but the truth is, if you need to modify a tuple, you're using the wrong data type (usually, a list would be more suitable). The primary benefit of tuples' immutability is a tuple of immutable objects (like strings and numbers and other tuples) has a hash value, allowing us to use them as keys in dictionaries, and members of a set. (A tuple that contains a mutable structure, like a list, set, or dict, isn't composed of immutable items, and doesn't have a hash value. We'll look closely at this distinction in the next section.)

Instances of Python's built-in generic tuple class are used to store data; behavior cannot be associated with a built-in tuple. If we require behavior to manipulate a tuple, we have to pass the...