Steven F. Lott - Mastering Object-Oriented Python

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First published: April 2014
Second edition: June 2019

Production reference: 1130619

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ISBN 978-1-78953-136-7

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Steven F. Lott has been programming since the 1970s, when computers were large, expensive, and rare. As a contract software developer and architect, he has worked on hundreds of projects, from very small to very large ones. He's been using Python to solve business problems for over 10 years. His other titles with Packt include Python Essentials, Mastering Object-Oriented Python, Functional Python Programming Second Edition, Python for Secret Agents, and Python for Secret Agents II. Steven is currently a technomad who lives in various places on the East Coast of the US. You can follow him on Twitter via the handle @s_lott.

Cody Jackson is a disabled military veteran, the founder of Socius Consulting an IT and business management consulting company in San Antonio and a cofounder of Top Men Technologies. He is currently employed at CACI International as the lead ICS/SCADA modeling and simulations engineer. He has been involved in the tech industry since 1994, when he joined the Navy as a nuclear chemist and Radcon Technician. Prior to CACI, he worked at ECPI University as a computer information systems adjunct professor. A self-taught Python programmer, he is the author of Learning to Program Using Python and Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja. He holds an Associate in Science degree, a Bachelor of Science degree, and a Master of Science degree.

Hugo Solis is an assistant professor in the Physics Department at the University of Costa Rica. His current research interests are computational cosmology, complexity, cryptography, and the influence of hydrogen on material properties. He has vast experience with languages, including C/C++ and Python for scientific programming. He is a member of the Free Software Foundation and has contributed code to some free software projects. He has also been a technical reviewer for Hands-On Qt for Python Developers and Learning Object-Oriented Programming, and he is the author of the Kivy Cookbook from Packt Publishing. Currently, he is in charge of the IFT, a Costa Rican scientific nonprofit organization for the multidisciplinary practice of physics.

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This book will introduce you to many advanced features of the Python programming language. The focus is on creating the highest quality Python programs possible. This requires exploring design alternatives and determining which design offers the best performance while still being a good fit for the problem that is being solved.

The majority of this book showcases a number of alternatives for a given design. Some will offer better performance, while some will appear simpler or be a better solution to the problem domain. It's essential to locate the best algorithms alongside optimal data structures in order to create the most value with the least computer processing. Time is money, and programs that save time will create more value for their users. Python makes a number of internal features directly available to our application programs. This means that our programs can be very tightly integrated with existing Python features. We can leverage numerous Python features by ensuring that our object-oriented designs (OODs) integrate well.

As we explore different algorithms and data structures, we'll discover different memory and performance alternatives. It's an important OOD skill to be able to work through alternate solutions in order to properly optimize the final application. One of the more important themes of this book is that there's no single best approach to any problem.