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

Hiding details with abstraction

Abstraction is a concept of OOP that helps in hiding internal details of a class or methods by providing a reference class with declarations of classes with empty declarations of methods. These reference classes are called abstract base and they are kind of a go-to parent class that holds the skeletal structure of all the methods that need to be implemented if a parent class is inherited. Python has a library called ABC that can be imported to define abstract base classes. Abstraction is more like giving a black box to external users by not revealing all the details of various methods defined inside a class but instead giving a reference class that can help the external users to implement the methods according to their own requirements.

For instance, the users of the Brooklyn branch don’t have to know the calculations that are handled by the Queens branch to calculate their maintenance cost. The information that the users of the Brooklyn branch...