Pythonic Programming: Tips for Becoming an Idiomatic Python Programmer

Length: 152 pages
Edition: 1
Language: English
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Publication Date: 2021-10-19
ISBN-10: 168050861X
ISBN-13: 9781680508611
Sales Rank: #466591 (See Top 100 Books)

Make your good Python code even better by following proven and effective pythonic programming tips. Avoid logical errors that usually go undetected by Python linters and code formatters, such as frequent data look-ups in long lists, improper use of local and global variables, and mishandled user input. Discover rare language features, like rational numbers, set comprehensions, counters, and pickling, that may boost your productivity. Discover how to apply general programming patterns, including caching, in your Python code. Become a better-than-average Python programmer, and develop self-documented, maintainable, easy-to-understand programs that are fast to run and hard to break.

Python is one of the most popular and rapidly growing modern programming languages. With more than 200 standard libraries and even more third-party libraries, it reaches into the software development areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, natural language processing, and computer vision. Find out how to improve your understanding of the spirit of the language by using one hundred pythonic tips to make your code safer, faster, and better documented.

This programming style manual is a quick reference of helpful hints and a random source of inspiration. Choose the suitable data structures for searching and sorting jobs and become aware of how a wrong choice may cause your application to be completely ineffective. Understand global and local variables, class and instance attributes, and information-hiding techniques. Create functions with flexible interfaces. Manage intermediate computation results by caching them in files and memory to improve performance and reliability. Polish your documentation skills to make your code easy for other programmers to understand. As a bonus, discover Easter eggs cleverly planted in the standard library by its developers.

Polish, secure, and speed-up your Python applications, and make them easier to maintain by following pythonic programming tips.

What You Need:

You will need a Python interpreter (ideally, version 3.4 or above) and the standard Python library that usually comes with the interpreter.

 Acknowledgments
 Preface
 Introduction
    About the Software
    About the Notation
    About the Reader
1. Documentation Tips
    Tip 1. Hello, World!
    Tip 2. Import This
    Tip 3. Know Ownership and Licensing
    Tip 4. Use Quotes of All Sorts
    Tip 5. Keep Letter Case Consistent
    Tip 6. Wrap Long Lines
    Tip 7. Self-Document Your Code
    Tip 8. Do Not Misuse Docstrings
    Tip 9. Let input() Speak for Itself
    Tip 10. Mark Dummy Variables
    Tip 11. Distinguish Parameters and Arguments
    Tip 12. Avoid “Magic” Values
    Tip 13. Enumerate Your Constants
2. General Tips
    Tip 14. Chain Comparison Operators
    Tip 15. Expand the Tabs
    Tip 16. Pickle It
    Tip 17. Avoid range() in Loops
    Tip 18. Pass It
    Tip 19. Try It
    Tip 20. Embrace Comprehensions
    Tip 21. Make Your Code Compact with Conditional Expressions
    Tip 22. Find the “Missing” Switch
    Tip 23. Eschew Comprehension Expressions, If Needed
    Tip 24. Use Slicing to Reverse and Split
    Tip 25. sum() Almost Anything
    Tip 26. Transpose with zip()
    Tip 27. Discover All Characters in One Place
    Tip 28. glob() the Files
    Tip 29. Use Strings as Files
    Tip 30. Pick to str() or to repr()
    Tip 31. Remember, input() Remembers
    Tip 32. Do Linear Algebra in Python
3. Data Types and Data Structures Tips
    Tip 33. Construct a One-Element Tuple
    Tip 34. Improve Readability with Raw Strings
    Tip 35. Unpack Lists and Tuples
    Tip 36. Print a List
    Tip 37. Flatten That List
    Tip 38. Treat Your Code as a Module
    Tip 39. Let Modules Act Independently
    Tip 40. Add Class Attributes
    Tip 41. Serialize Objects
    Tip 42. Count with defaultdict
    Tip 43. Count with Counter
    Tip 44. Explore How int() Supports Other Bases
    Tip 45. Discover Complex Numbers
    Tip 46. Rational Numbers Exist
    Tip 47. Discover an Infinity
    Tip 48. Carve It in Stone
    Tip 49. No Trees? Use a dict()
4. Function Tips
    Tip 50. Make Functions Always Return Something
    Tip 51. Return Consistently
    Tip 52. Let the Caller Print
    Tip 53. Return Many Values
    Tip 54. Understand Optional and Keyword Parameters
    Tip 55. Pass Arguments Your Way
    Tip 56. Omit Else After Return
    Tip 57. Chain Function Calls
    Tip 58. Yield, Do Not Return
    Tip 59. Return and Apply Functions
    Tip 60. Savvy Anonymous Functions
5. Performance Tips
    Tip 61. Time It
    Tip 62. Avoid Function Calls; They Are Costly
    Tip 63. Build, Then Print
    Tip 64. Format with Formatted Strings
    Tip 65. Import Wisely
    Tip 66. Import as Needed
    Tip 67. Optimize Lookups
    Tip 68. Cache It
    Tip 69. Checkpoint, It Saves Time
    Tip 70. Sort Big in Place
    Tip 71. Delete Your Garbage
    Tip 72. Beware of Large and Slow Ints
    Tip 73. Waste Space, Save Time
    Tip 74. Do Not str() a str
6. Safety Tips
    Tip 75. Call That Function
    Tip 76. Get the Hang of Local Variables
    Tip 77. Grasp What Is Truth
    Tip 78. Check for Range
    Tip 79. Strip User Input
    Tip 80. Let Python Close Your Files
    Tip 81. Read Files Safely
    Tip 82. Hide Everything
    Tip 83. Use Properties
    Tip 84. Compare One to Many
    Tip 85. Check, Then Touch
    Tip 86. Assert Conditions
    Tip 87. Do Not eval(); It Is Evil
    Tip 88. Parse with literal_eval()
    Tip 89. Treat Variables as References
    Tip 90. Isolate Exceptions
    Tip 91. Compare Prefixes and Suffixes
    Tip 92. Remember, There Are No Globals
    Tip 93. Is Is Not What You Think It Is
    Tip 94. Distinguish type() and isinstance()
    Tip 95. 50,000 Is Not a Number, but 50_000 Is
    Tip 96. Do Not Confuse Boolean and Bitwise Operators
    Tip 97. Do Not Call Your List “List”
    Tip 98. Do Not Change That Loop Variable
    Tip 99. str.split() by White Spaces
    Tip 100. Get over str.split()
7. Wrapping Up
 Bibliography