Python Tricks

"I don't even feel like I've scratched the surface of what I can do with Python" With Python Tricks: The Book you'll discover Python's best practices and the power of beautiful & Pythonic code with simple examples and a step-by-step narrative. You'll get one step closer to mastering Python, so you can write beautiful and idiomatic code that comes to you naturally. Learning the ins and outs of Python is difficult-and with this book you'll be able to focus on the practical skills that really matter. Discover the "hidden gold" in Python's standard library and start writing clean and Pythonic code today. Who Should Read This Book: If you're wondering which lesser known parts in Python you should know about, you'll get a roadmap with this book. Discover cool (yet practical!) Python tricks and blow your coworkers' minds in your next code review. If you've got experience with legacy versions of Python, the book will get you up to speed with modern patterns and features introduced in Python 3 and backported to Python 2. If you've worked with other programming languages and you want to get up to speed with Python, you'll pick up the idioms and practical tips you need to become a confident and effective Pythonista. If you want to make Python your own and learn how to write clean and Pythonic code, you'll discover best practices and little-known tricks to round out your knowledge. What Python Developers Say About The Book: "I kept thinking that I wished I had access to a book like this when I started learning Python many years ago." - Mariatta Wijaya, Python Core Developer "This book makes you write better Python code!" - Bob Belderbos, Software Developer at Oracle "Far from being just a shallow collection of snippets, this book will leave the attentive reader with a deeper understanding of the inner workings of Python as well as an appreciation for its beauty." - Ben Felder, Pythonista "It's like having a seasoned tutor explaining, well, tricks!" - Daniel Meyer, Sr. Desktop Administrator at Tesla Inc.

Python for Everybody is designed to introduce students to programming and software development through the lens of exploring data. You can think of the Python programming language as your tool to solve data problems that are beyond the capability of a spreadsheet.Python is an easy to use and easy to learn programming language that is freely available on Macintosh, Windows, or Linux computers. So once you learn Python you can use it for the rest of your career without needing to purchase any software.This book uses the Python 3 language. The earlier Python 2 version of this book is titled "Python for Informatics: Exploring Information".There are free downloadable electronic copies of this book in various formats and supporting materials for the book at www.pythonlearn.com. The course materials are available to you under a Creative Commons License so you can adapt them to teach your own Python course.

Make the Leap From Beginner to Intermediate in Python... Python Basics: A Practical Introduction to Python 3 Your Complete Python Curriculum-With Exercises, Interactive Quizzes, and Sample Projects What should you learn about Python in the beginning to get a strong foundation? With Python Basics, you'll not only cover the core concepts you really need to know, but you'll also learn them in the most efficient order with the help of practical exercises and interactive quizzes. You'll know enough to be dangerous with Python, fast! Who Should Read This Book If you're new to Python, you'll get a practical, step-by-step roadmap on developing your foundational skills. You'll be introduced to each concept and language feature in a logical order. Every step in this curriculum is explained and illustrated with short, clear code samples. Our goal with this book is to educate, not to impress or intimidate. If you're familiar with some basic programming concepts, you'll get a clear and well-tested introduction to Python. This is a practical introduction to Python that jumps right into the meat and potatoes without sacrificing substance. If you have prior experience with languages like VBA, PowerShell, R, Perl, C, C++, C#, Java, or Swift the numerous exercises within each chapter will fast-track your progress. If you're a seasoned developer, you'll get a Python 3 crash course that brings you up to speed with modern Python programming. Mix and match the chapters that interest you the most and use the interactive quizzes and review exercises to check your learning progress as you go along. If you're a self-starter completely new to coding, you'll get practical and motivating examples. You'll begin by installing Python and setting up a coding environment on your computer from scratch, and then continue from there. We'll get you coding right away so that you become competent and knowledgeable enough to solve real-world problems, fast. Develop a passion for programming by solving interesting problems with Python every day! If you're looking to break into a coding or data-science career, you'll pick up the practical foundations with this book. We won't just dump a boat load of theoretical information on you so you can "sink or swim"-instead you'll learn from hands-on, practical examples one step at a time. Each concept is broken down for you so you'll always know what you can do with it in practical terms. If you're interested in teaching others "how to Python," this will be your guidebook. If you're looking to stoke the coding flame in your coworkers, kids, or relatives-use our material to teach them. All the sequencing has been done for you so you'll always know what to cover next and how to explain it. What Python Developers Say About The Book: "Go forth and learn this amazing language using this great book." - Michael Kennedy, Talk Python "The wording is casual, easy to understand, and makes the information flow well." - Thomas Wong, Pythonista "I floundered for a long time trying to teach myself. I slogged through dozens of incomplete online tutorials. I snoozed through hours of boring screencasts. I gave up on countless crufty books from big-time publishers. And then I found Real Python. The easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions break the big concepts down into bite-sized chunks written in plain English. The authors never forget their audience and are consistently thorough and detailed in their explanations. I'm up and running now, but I constantly refer to the material for guidance." - Jared Nielsen, Pythonista

Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners. Python One-Liners will teach you how to read and write "one-liners": concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You'll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert. The book's five chapters cover tips and tricks, regular expressions, machine learning, core data science topics, and useful algorithms. Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You'll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments. You'll also learn how to: • Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution • Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics • Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning • Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators • Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting By the end of the book, you'll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of "Python art" in merely a single line.

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.

“Each item in Slatkin’s Effective Python teaches a self-contained lesson with its own source code. This makes the book random-access: Items are easy to browse and study in whatever order the reader needs. I will be recommending Effective Python to students as an admirably compact source of mainstream advice on a very broad range of topics for the intermediate Python programmer.” —Brandon Rhodes, software engineer at Dropbox and chair of PyCon 2016-2017 It’s easy to start coding with Python, which is why the language is so popular. However, Python’s unique strengths, charms, and expressiveness can be hard to grasp, and there are hidden pitfalls that can easily trip you up. Effective Python will help you master a truly “Pythonic” approach to programming, harnessing Python’s full power to write exceptionally robust and well-performing code. Using the concise, scenario-driven style pioneered in Scott Meyers’ best-selling Effective C++, Brett Slatkin brings together 59 Python best practices, tips, and shortcuts, and explains them with realistic code examples. Drawing on years of experience building Python infrastructure at Google, Slatkin uncovers little-known quirks and idioms that powerfully impact code behavior and performance. You’ll learn the best way to accomplish key tasks, so you can write code that’s easier to understand, maintain, and improve. Key features include Actionable guidelines for all major areas of Python 3.x and 2.x development, with detailed explanations and examples Best practices for writing functions that clarify intention, promote reuse, and avoid bugs Coverage of how to accurately express behaviors with classes and objects Guidance on how to avoid pitfalls with metaclasses and dynamic attributes More efficient approaches to concurrency and parallelism Better techniques and idioms for using Python’s built-in modules Tools and best practices for collaborative development Solutions for debugging, testing, and optimization in order to improve quality and performance

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python takes the journeyman Pythonista to true expertise. More than any other language, Python was created with the philosophy of simplicity and parsimony. Now 25 years old, Python has become the primary or secondary language (after SQL) for many business users. With popularity comes diversity—and possibly dilution. This guide, collaboratively written by over a hundred members of the Python community, describes best practices currently used by package and application developers. Unlike other books for this audience, The Hitchhiker’s Guide is light on reusable code and heavier on design philosophy, directing the reader to excellent sources that already exist.