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

Exercises


If you've never dealt with exceptions before, the first thing you need to do is look at any old Python code you've written and notice if there are places you should have been handling exceptions. How would you handle them? Do you need to handle them at all? Sometimes, letting the exception propagate to the console is the best way to communicate to the user, especially if the user is also the script's coder. Sometimes, you can recover from the error and allow the program to continue. Sometimes, you can only reformat the error into something the user can understand and display it to them.

Some common places to look are file I/O (is it possible your code will try to read a file that doesn't exist?), mathematical expressions (is it possible that a value you are dividing by is zero?), list indices (is the list empty?), and dictionaries (does the key exist?). Ask yourself whether you should ignore the problem, handle it by checking values first, or handle it with an exception. Pay special...