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

Optimizing small objects with __slots__

The general case for an object allows a dynamic collection of attributes. There's a special case for an immutable object with a fixed collection of attributes based on the tuple class. We looked at both of these in the Designing classes with little unique processing recipe.

There's a middle ground. We can also define an object with a fixed number of attributes, but the values of the attributes can be changed. By changing the class from an unlimited collection of attributes to a fixed set of attributes, it turns out that we can also save memory and processing time.

How can we create optimized classes with a fixed set of attributes?

Getting ready

Let's look at the idea of a hand of playing cards in the casino game of Blackjack. There are two parts to a hand:

  • The bet
  • The cards

Both have dynamic values. Generally, each hand starts with a bet and an empty collection of cards. The dealer then...