Book Image

Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Not enough developers understand the benefits of functional programming, or even what it is. Author Steven Lott demystifies the approach, teaching you how to improve the way you code in Python and make gains in memory use and performance. If you’re a leetcoder preparing for coding interviews, this book is for you. Starting from the fundamentals, this book shows you how to apply functional thinking and techniques in a range of scenarios, with Python 3.10+ examples focused on mathematical and statistical algorithms, data cleaning, and exploratory data analysis. You'll learn how to use generator expressions, list comprehensions, and decorators to your advantage. You don't have to abandon object-oriented design completely, though – you'll also see how Python's native object orientation is used in conjunction with functional programming techniques. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in the essential functional programming features of Python and understand why and when functional thinking helps. You'll also have all the tools you need to pursue any additional functional topics that are not part of the Python language.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Preface
16
Other Books You Might Enjoy
17
Index

1.5 Summary

In this chapter, we’ve looked at programming paradigms with an eye toward distinguishing the functional paradigm from the imperative paradigm. For our purposes, object-oriented programming is a kind of imperative programming; it relies on explicit state changes. Our objective in this book is to explore the functional programming features of Python. We’ve noted that some parts of Python don’t allow purely functional programming; we’ll be using some hybrid techniques that meld the good features of succinct, expressive functional programming with some high-performance optimizations in Python.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at five specific functional programming techniques in detail. These techniques will form the essential foundation for our hybridized functional programming in Python.