Python How-To (MEAP V10)

ave you ever asked yourself, “How do I do that in Python?” If so, you’ll love this practical collection of the most important Python techniques. Python How-To includes over 60 detailed answers to questions like How do I join and split strings? How do I access dictionary keys, values, and items? How do I set and use the return value in function calls? How do I process JSON data? How do I create lazy attributes to improve performance? How do I change variables in a different namespace? …and much more Python How-To walks you through the most important coding techniques in Python. Whether you’re doing data science, building web applications, or writing admin scripts, you’ll find answers to your “how-to” questions in this book. Author Yong Cui’s clear and practical writing is perfect for beginners and veterans alike, with insightful code snippets, interesting graphics, and challenging exercises. Along the way, you’ll learn how to take advantage of Python’s versatile tools and libraries. about the technology No matter where you are on your Python journey, you’re going to run into situations where you ask “How do I do that?” This book gives you concrete answers to the most common questions in areas like manipulating text, working with collections, managing objects and functions, file management, and so on. As one of the most popular languages, Python is the choice of language for many first-time coding learners. Its open-source, general-purpose, platform-independent nature has engendered probably the most active developer community, which has resulted in tens of thousands of freely available libraries for web development, Machine Learning (ML), Data Science, and many other specialties. No matter whether you just started with coding in Python or programming in general, I hope that we share the same belief: we’ve entered an era in which knowing to code in Python gives you a tremendous advantage — you’re having access to numerous tools that Python has to offer. As you may realize, Python is so versatile that it has a plethora of tools for many specialty domains, such as finance, engineering, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence. If you're entering or about to enter one of these domains, knowing Python will make your work much easier because of the access to these handy tools. However, using these tools requires you have a solid understanding of the essential Python skills, which are this book's focus — teaching you domain-independent Python knowledge. No matter how sophisticated your domain-specific Python tool is, it won't take long for you to figure it out! In the Python ecosystem, we use domain-specific Python tools, such as web frameworks and ML libraries, to address specific tasks in our jobs. The effective employment of these tools is nontrivial, as it requires a considerable breadth of familiarity with essential Python skills, such as processing texts, dealing with structured data, creating control flows, and handling files. Python programmers can write different solutions to address the same tasks. Among these solutions, one of them is probably better than the remaining, because it may be more concise, more readable, or more efficient, which we term as Pythonic — an idiomatic coding style that all Python programmers strive to acquire. It is what this book is about — how to write Pythonic code to address programming tasks. about the book Python How-To is full of techniques and best practices for writing readable and maintainable Python code, with careful cross-referencing that reveals how the same concept can be used in different contexts. Each chapter stands alone, so you can dip in whenever you need a practical solution to a common Python problem. about the reader For beginning to intermediate Python programmers.