Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By : Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By: Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

This Learning Path helps you get comfortable with the world of Python. It starts with a thorough and practical introduction to Python. You’ll quickly start writing programs, building websites, and working with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. With the power of linked lists, binary searches, and sorting algorithms, you'll easily create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. After understanding cooperative inheritance, you'll expertly raise, handle, and manipulate exceptions. You will effortlessly integrate the object-oriented and not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python, and create maintainable applications using higher level design patterns. Once you’ve covered core topics, you’ll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy it is to create unit tests. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have built components that are easy to understand, debug, and can be used across different applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learn Python Programming - Second Edition by Fabrizio Romano • Python Data Structures and Algorithms by Benjamin Baka • Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
8
Stacks and Queues
10
Hashing and Symbol Tables
Index

Specifying attributes and behaviors


We now have a grasp of some basic object-oriented terminology. Objects are instances of classes that can be associated with each other. An object instance is a specific object with its own set of data and behaviors; a specific orange on the table in front of us is said to be an instance of the general class of oranges. That's simple enough, but let's dive into the meaning of those two words, data and behaviors.

Data describes objects

Let's start with data. Data represents the individual characteristics of a certain object. A class can define specific sets of characteristics that are shared by all objects from that class. Any specific object can have different data values for the given characteristics. For example, the three oranges on our table (if we haven't eaten any) could each weigh a different amount. The orange class could have a weight attribute to represent that datum. All instances of the orange class have a weight attribute, but each orange has...