According to the Python documentation, deques “are a generalization of stacks and queues”. They are pronounced “deck” which is short for “double-ended queue”. They are a replacement container for the Python list. Deques are thread-safe and support memory efficient appends and pops from either side of the deque. A list is optimized for fast fixed-length […]
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I have decided to offer a pre-order of the paperback version of my next book. You will be able to pre-order a signed copy of the book which will ship in September, 2016. I am limiting the number of pre-orders to 100. If you’re interested in getting the book, you can do so here
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This week we welcome John Cook as our PyDev of the Week! John has a fun Python blog that I read from to time and he graciously accepted my offer of interviewing him this week. Let’s take a few moments to get to know him better. Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies,
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We are entering the last few days for the Kickstarter Campaign for my second book, Python 201. Since we’re almost to our stretch goal, I have added new chapters to the book. In addition to what was already covered, the book will also cover the following topics: Python’s super() descriptors (magic methods) Scope (local, global
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This week we welcome Thomas Robitaille (@astrofrog) as our PyDev of the Week! Thomas is the lead developer of the Glue data exploration package and one of the lead developers of the Astropy project, which is a Python library for Astronomy. He also writes a fun Python blog. Let’s take a few moments to get
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My artist got back to me today with a mostly done cover that I wanted to share with you all: We have 8 days left in the campaign and we’re almost to our stretch goal! Be sure to tell your friends that now’s the best time to show support for this fun book! You can
Python 201 Kickstarter Update #3 – Cover Almost Done! Read More »
A ChainMap is a class from the collections module that provides the ability to link multiple mappings together such that they end up being a single unit. If you look at the documentation, you will notice that it accepts *maps, which means that a ChainMap will accept any number of mappings or dictionaries and turn
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This week we welcome Ezio Melotti as our PyDev of the Week! Ezio is a core developer of the Python language. You can get an idea of what he’s been up to via his bitbucket page. Let’s take a few moments to get to know him! Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies,
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Python’s collections module has another great subclass of dict known as OrderedDict. As the name implies, this dictionary keeps track of the order of the keys as they are added. If you create a regular dict, you will note that it is an unordered data collection: >>> d = {‘banana’: 3, ‘apple’:4, ‘pear’: 1, ‘orange’:
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We’re halfway through the Kickstarter campaign for my new book, Python 201 and we’re a little over halfway to my first stretch goal. If you know anyone who would like to add to their Python skills, be sure to post a link to the campaign to your social website(s) of choice. I also added a
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The collections module has another handy tool called defaultdict. The defaultdict is a subclass of Python’s dict that accepts a default_factory as its primary argument. The default_factory is usually a Python type, such as int or list, but you can also use a function or a lambda too. Let’s start by creating a regular Python
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Over the weekend, I spent some time rearranging ideas for my latest book such that I have have four specific sections of the book. Here they are: Part I – Intermediate Modules Chapter 1 – The argparse module Chapter 2 – The collections module Chapter 3 – The contextlib module (Context Managers) Chapter 4 –
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This week we welcome Massimo DiPierro (@mdipierro) as our PyDev of the Week! Massimo is the inventor and lead developer of web2py, but he’s also contributed to lots of other projects which you can see on his github profile. He is also the author of the following books: Annotated Algorithms in Python: with Applications in
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Python’s collections module has specialized container datatypes that can be used to replace Python’s general purpose containers. The one that we’ll be focusing on here is the namedtuple which you can use to replace Python’s tuple. Of course, the namedtuple is not a drop-in replacement as you will soon see. I have seen some programmers
Python 201: namedtuple Read More »
I noticed that CodeEval put out a post that Python is their most popular programming language for 5 years in a row! Admittedly, their Python usage has dropped 14% while others have gained, but Python has still managed to stay in the lead.
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