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
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Writing testable scripts with the script-library switch

It's often very easy to create a Python script file. A script file is very easy to use because when we provide the file to Python, it runs immediately. In some cases, there are no function or class definitions; the script file is the sequence of Python statements.

These simple script files are very difficult to test. More importantly, they're also difficult to reuse. When we want to build larger and more sophisticated applications from a collection of script files, we're often forced to re-engineer a simple script into a function.

Getting ready

Let's say that we have a handy implementation of the haversine distance function called haversine(), and it's in a file named ch03_r11.py.

Initially, the file might look like this:

import csv
from pathlib import Path
from math import radians, sin, cos, sqrt, asin
from functools import partial
MI = 3959
NM = 3440
KM = 6373
def haversine...