Book Image

Metaprogramming with Python

By : Sulekha AloorRavi
Book Image

Metaprogramming with Python

By: Sulekha AloorRavi

Overview of this book

Effective and reusable code makes your application development process seamless and easily maintainable. With Python, you will have access to advanced metaprogramming features that you can use to build high-performing applications. The book starts by introducing you to the need and applications of metaprogramming, before navigating the fundamentals of object-oriented programming. Next, you will learn about simple decorators, work with metaclasses, and later focus on introspection and reflection. You’ll also delve into generics and typing before defining templates for algorithms. As you progress, you will understand your code using abstract syntax trees and explore method resolution order. This Python book also shows you how to create your own dynamic objects before structuring the objects through design patterns. Finally, you will learn simple code-generation techniques along with discovering best practices and eventually building your own applications. By the end of this learning journey, you’ll have acquired the skills and confidence you need to design and build reusable high-performing applications that can solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals – Introduction to Object-Oriented Python and Metaprogramming
4
Part 2: Deep Dive – Building Blocks of Metaprogramming I
11
Part 3: Deep Dive – Building Blocks of Metaprogramming II

Summary

In this chapter, we have learned about the concept of the abstract syntax tree by exploring the ast library in Python 3. We also inspected Python code using abstract syntax trees. We understood the applications of abstract syntax trees by modifying the code at the node level using source code from our core example.

Similar to other chapters in this book, this chapter covered the concept of abstract syntax trees in metaprogramming. This also helps in understanding how to modify the behavior of Python objects externally without modifying the source code. Modifying the abstract syntax tree instead of the actual methods and attributes in the code helps migrate source code from different versions of Python or the application development platform conveniently without impacting the actual logic of the code.

In the next chapter, we will be looking at the concept of method resolution order with some other interesting examples.