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

Chapter 3: Understanding Decorators and their Applications

From this chapter onwards, we will start looking at various concepts that are part of metaprogramming along with examples of how to apply them. We will first take a look at decorators and how decorators can be implemented in Python 3.

Decorators are one of the metaprogramming concepts that deal with decorating a function without modifying the actual function body. As the name suggests, a decorator adds additional value to a function, a method, or a class by allowing the function to become an argument of another function that decorates or gives more information on the function, method, or class being decorated. Decorators can be developed on an individual user-defined function or on a method that is defined inside a class, or they can be defined on a class itself too. Understanding decorators will help us to enhance the reusability of functions, methods, and classes by manipulating them externally without impacting the actual...