Название: The Python Apprentice (2022)
Автор: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Издательство: Leanpub
Год: 2022-07-15
Страниц: 356
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 39.7 MB

Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to the Python programming language, providing you with the tools and insight you need to be a productive Python developer. We want to help you build solid foundations, orient you in the universe of Python, and put you in a position to direct your own continued learning.

The Python Apprentice together with The Python Journeyman and The Python Master comprise a trilogy of books on the Python programming language and the Python Standard Library. The material in these books is derived from Sixty North's popular and battle-tested training courses which have led thousands of programmers on a journey to being productive with Python.

Our books, which use Python 3, follow a spiral curriculum: We introduce topics gently and then revisit them on multiple occasions to add the depth required to support your progression as a Python developer. We've worked hard to structure the syllabus to avoid forward references. On only a few occasions do we require you to accept techniques on trust, before explaining them later; where we do, it's to deliberately establish good habits.

On a technical level, Python is a strongly typed language. This means that every object in the language has a definite type, and there’s generally no way to circumvent that type. At the same time, Python is dynamically typed, meaning that there’s no type-checking of your code prior to running it. This is in contrast to statically typed languages like C++ or Java where a compiler does a lot of type-checking for you, rejecting programs which misuse objects. Ultimately, the best description of the Python type system is that it uses duck-typing where an object’s suitability for a context is only determined at runtime. We’ll cover this in more detail in Chapter 8.

Python is a general-purpose programming language. It’s not intended for use in any particular domain or environment, but instead can be fruitfully used for a wide variety of tasks. There are, of course, some areas where it’s less suitable than others – for example in extremely time-sensitive or memory-constrained environments – but for the most part Python is as flexible and adaptable as many modern programming languages, and more so than most.

Python is an interpreted language. This is a bit of a misstatement, technically, because Python is normally compiled into a form of byte-code before it’s executed. However, this compilation happens invisibly, and the experience of using Python is normally one of immediately executing code without a noticeable compilation phase. This lack of an interruption between editing and running is one of the great joys of working with Python.