BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN NOVICE AND PROFESSIONAL
You've completed a basic Python programming tutorial or finished Al
Sweigart's bestseller, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. What's
the next step toward becoming a capable, confident software developer?
Welcome to Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python. More than a mere
collection of advanced syntax and masterful tips for writing clean code,
you'll learn how to advance your Python programming skills by using the
command line and other professional tools like code formatters, type
checkers, linters, and version control. Sweigart takes you through best
practices for setting up your development environment, naming variables,
and improving readability, then tackles documentation, organization and
performance measurement, as well as object-oriented design and the Big-O
algorithm analysis commonly used in coding interviews. The skills you
learn will boost your ability to program--not just in Python but in any
language.
You'll learn:
Coding style, and how to use Python's Black auto-formatting tool for
cleaner code
Common sources of bugs, and how to detect them with static analyzers
How to structure the files in your code projects with the Cookiecutter
template tool
Functional programming techniques like lambda and higher-order functions
How to profile the speed of your code with Python's built-in timeit
and cProfile modules
The computer science behind Big-O algorithm analysis
How to make your comments and docstrings informative, and how often to
write them
How to create classes in object-oriented programming, and why they're
used to organize code
Toward the end of the book you'll read a detailed source-code breakdown
of two classic command-line games, the Tower of Hanoi (a logic puzzle)
and Four-in-a-Row (a two-player tile-dropping game), and a breakdown of
how their code follows the book's best practices. You'll test your
skills by implementing the program yourself.
Of course, no single book can make you a professional software
developer. But Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python will get you further
down that path and make you a better programmer, as you learn to write
readable code that's easy to debug and perfectly Pythonic
Requirements: Covers Python 3.6 and higher
