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 4: Working with Metaclasses

Metaclasses, the focal point of this chapter, can manipulate the way a new class is created by decorating the arguments without impacting the actual class definition itself. Metaclasses are not very frequently used in Python application development unless there is a need for more advanced implementations of frameworks or APIs that need features such as manipulation of classes or dynamic class generation and so on.

In the previous chapter, we looked at the concept of decorators with some examples. Understanding decorators helps in following metaclasses with more ease since both decorators and metaclasses deal with metaprogramming on Python 3 program objects by manipulating them externally.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • Overview of metaclasses
  • The structure of a metaclass
  • The application of metaclasses
  • Switching metaclasses
  • Inheritance in metaclasses
  • Manipulating class variables

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