Book Image

Dancing with Python

By : Robert S. Sutor
Book Image

Dancing with Python

By: Robert S. Sutor

Overview of this book

Dancing with Python helps you learn Python and quantum computing in a practical way. It will help you explore how to work with numbers, strings, collections, iterators, and files. The book goes beyond functions and classes and teaches you to use Python and Qiskit to create gates and circuits for classical and quantum computing. Learn how quantum extends traditional techniques using the Grover Search Algorithm and the code that implements it. Dive into some advanced and widely used applications of Python and revisit strings with more sophisticated tools, such as regular expressions and basic natural language processing (NLP). The final chapters introduce you to data analysis, visualizations, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in programming the latest and most powerful quantum computers, the Pythonic way.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
2
Part I: Getting to Know Python
10
PART II: Algorithms and Circuits
14
PART III: Advanced Features and Libraries
19
References
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
Appendices
Appendix C: The Complete UniPoly Class
Appendix D: The Complete Guitar Class Hierarchy
Appendix F: Production Notes

Working with Expressions

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

—Albert Einstein

At one level, a programming language is a super-calculator with the ability to work with data. You can do arithmetic with numbers or manipulate text represented as strings. More than that, a language allows you to create functions that perform custom operations and even to create new structures for data.

In this chapter, we introduce the basics of Python and how it implements the programming features described in Chapter 1, Doing the Things That Coders Do. In subsequent chapters, we go into greater detail and expand upon these ideas.

Via a search of the web, I saw an estimate that Python is known and used by more than 8 million developers. It is an excellent modern language that has been built by dozens of open source coders over the last thirty years. [HPY]

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