Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Input/Output, Physical Format, and Logical Layout

Computing often works with persistent data. There may be source data to be analyzed, or output to be created using Python input and output operations. The map of the dungeon that's explored in a game is data that will be input to the game application. Images, sounds, and movies are data output by some applications and input by other applications. Even a request through a network will involve input and output operations. The common aspect to all of these is the concept of a file of data. The term file is overloaded with many meanings:

  • The operating system (OS) uses a file as a way to organize bytes of data on a device. All of the wildly different kinds of content are reduced to a collection of bytes. It's the responsibility of application software to make sense of the bytes. Two common kinds of devices offer variations in terms of the features of OS files:
  • Block devices such as disks or solid...