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

The singleton pattern


The singleton pattern is one of the most controversial patterns; many have accused it of being an anti-pattern, a pattern that should be avoided, not promoted. In Python, if someone is using the singleton pattern, they're almost certainly doing something wrong, probably because they're coming from a more restrictive programming language.

So, why discuss it at all? Singleton is one of the most famous of all design patterns. It is useful in overly object-oriented languages, and is a vital part of traditional object-oriented programming. More relevantly, the idea behind singleton is useful, even if we implement the concept in a totally different way in Python.

The basic idea behind the singleton pattern is to allow exactly one instance of a certain object to exist. Typically, this object is a sort of manager class like those we discussed in Chapter 19, When to Use Object-Oriented Programming. Such objects often need to be referenced by a wide variety of other objects, and...