Chapter 7. Sufficiently advanced technology...

In this chapter, we’re going to be looking at some of the more advanced tasks Python can do. In chapter 1, you learned that Python is known as a multi-paradigm language, which means it doesn’t confine you to just one way of doing things. There are three main styles of programming: imperative, object-oriented, and functional. Python lets you work with all three, and even mix and match them where necessary.

We’ve already covered imperative and most of object-oriented programming in the chapters so far, so this chapter will focus mostly on functional programming and the more advanced parts of object-oriented programming in Python.

Object orientation

Let’s start by taking a second look at how object-oriented classes should be organized, using two separate methods: mixin classes and the super() method.

Mixin classes

Sometimes you don’t need an entire class to be able to do something. Perhaps you only need to add logging, or the ability to save the state of your class to disk. In these cases, you could add the functionality to a base class, or to each class that needs it, but that can get pretty repetitive. There’s an easier way, called a mixin class.

Customizing classes

Generators and iterators

Using generators

Functional programming

Where to from here?

Summary