Book Image

Learn Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By : Fabrizio Romano, Heinrich Kruger
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Fabrizio Romano, Heinrich Kruger

Overview of this book

Learn Python Programming, Third Edition is both a theoretical and practical introduction to Python, an extremely flexible and powerful programming language that can be applied to many disciplines. This book will make learning Python easy and give you a thorough understanding of the language. You'll learn how to write programs, build modern APIs, and work with data by using renowned Python data science libraries. This revised edition covers the latest updates on API management, packaging applications, and testing. There is also broader coverage of context managers and an updated data science chapter. The book empowers you to take ownership of writing your software and become independent in fetching the resources you need. You will have a clear idea of where to go and how to build on what you have learned from the book. Through examples, the book explores a wide range of applications and concludes by building real-world Python projects based on the concepts you have learned.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Type hinting: An overview

Before we start tackling the topic of APIs, let's take a look at Python's type hinting.

One of the reasons we chose FastAPI to create this project is that it is based on type hinting. Type hinting was introduced in Python 3.5, by PEP484 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/). This PEP builds on top of another functionality, function annotations, that was introduced in Python 3.0 by PEP3107 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/).

PEP484 was strongly inspired by Mypy (http://mypy-lang.org), an optional static type checker for Python.

Python is both a strongly typed and a dynamically typed language.

Strong typing means that variables have a type, and the type matters when we perform operations on variables. Let us explain this concept with an example in an imaginary language:

a = 7
b = "7"
a + b == 14
concatenate(a, b) == "77"

In this example, we imagine a language that is weakly typed...