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

3.6 What does “Pythonic” mean?

You’ve now seen enough of Python to see that it is a powerful and elegant programming language. You are coding in a Pythonic way when you take advantage of that elegance and further create something that beautifully and succinctly accomplishes your task. Examples of being Pythonic include:

  • You use for in a loop such as for item in my_list:, instead of defining and using an index to access list members.
  • You interchange the values of two variables using simultaneous assignment.
  • You make a new list in reverse order from an existing list using slicing:
    my_list[::-1].
  • You code a comprehension to build a new list instead of using append:
    [x**2 for x in range(13) if x % 3 == 0]
    
    [0, 9, 36, 81, 144]
    

You’ll see other examples as we move through this introduction to Python.

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