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

Getting to know built-in decorators

Now, the question is, do we have to always create user-defined or custom decorators to be applied to classes and methods, or do we have some pre-defined decorators that can be used for specific purposes.

In addition to the user-defined decorators that we’ve looked at throughout this chapter, Python has its own built-in decorators, such as @staticmethod and @classmethod, that can be directly applied to methods. These decorators add certain important functionalities to methods and classes during the process of the class definition itself. We will be looking at these two decorators in detail, as follows.

The static method

The static method@staticmethod – is a decorator that takes in a regular Python function as an input argument and converts it into a static method. Static methods can be created inside a class but will not use the implicit first argument of the class object instance usually denoted as an argument named...