Preface

This book will introduce you to more advanced features of the Python programming language. The focus is on creating the highest quality Python programs possible. This often means creating programs that have the highest performance or are the most maintainable. This means exploring design alternatives and determining which design offers the best performance while still being a good fit with the problem that is being solved.

Most of the book will look at a number of alternatives for a given design. Some will have better performance. Some will seem simpler or be a better solution for the problem domain. It's essential to locate the best algorithms and optimal data structures 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 OO designs integrate well.

We'll often focus on a specific problem and examine several variant solutions to the problem. As we look at different algorithms and data structures, we'll see different memory and performance alternatives. It's an important OO design skill 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. There are a number of alternative approaches with different attributes.

On programming style, the subject of style generates a surprising amount of interest. The astute reader will note that the examples do not meticulously conform to PEP-8 in every single particular detail of the name choice or punctuation.

As we move towards achieving mastery over object-oriented Python, we'll spend a great deal of time reading Python code from a variety of sources. We'll observe wide variability even within the Python Standard Library modules. Rather than presenting examples that are all perfectly consistent, we've opted for some inconsistency, the lack of consistency will better confirm with code as seen in the various open source projects encountered in the wild.