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
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Assignment expressions

Before we look at some more complicated examples, we would like to briefly introduce you to a relatively new feature that was added to the language in Python 3.8, via PEP 572 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572). Assignment expressions allow us to bind a value to a name in places where normal assignment statements are not allowed. Instead of the normal assignment operator =, assignment expressions use := (known as the walrus operator because it resembles the eyes and tusks of a walrus).

Statements and expressions

To understand the difference between normal assignments and assignment expressions, we need to understand the difference between statements and expressions. According to the Python documentation (https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html), a statement is:

…part of a suite (a "block" of code). A statement is either an expression or one of several constructs with a keyword, such as ifwhile or...