Modern Python Cookbook: The latest in modern Python recipes for the busy modern programmer

by Steven F. Lott

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great scripting language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, you can gain insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python. The recipes will benefit everyone ranging from beginner to an expert. The book is broken down into 13 chapters that build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. The recipes will touch upon all the necessary Python concepts related to data structures, OOP, functional programming, as well as statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively use the advantages that it offers. You will end the book equipped with the knowledge of testing, web services, and configuration and application integration tips and tricks. The recipes take a problem-solution approach to resolve issues commonly faced by Python programmers across the globe. You will be armed with the knowledge of creating applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, and command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation. Steven F. Lott has been programming since the 70s, when computers were large, expensive, and rare. As a contract software developer and architect, he has worked on hundreds of projects, from very small to very large. He's been using Python to solve business problems for over 10 years. He’s currently leveraging Python to implement microservices and ETL pipelines. His other titles with Packt Publishing include Python Essentials, Mastering Object-Oriented Python, Functional Python Programming, and Python for Secret Agents. Steven is currently a technomad who lives in various places on the east coast of the U.S. His technology blog is and his LinkedIn address is

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Nonfiction, Computers

692 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2016

Reviews

[Jascha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting more from this book, much more. Topics, that is, problems you face while programming with Python, are split into topics and range from files, classes up to more generic and basic topics such as naming your stuff.

Being a relatively new book, I was expecting way more Python 3.6+ topics covered. Maybe the differences/porting from Python 2 on those specific topics. That's not really the case.

All the recipes are very basic and those who are already moderately comfortable with the language won't reallt find anything useful.

[Vlad Bezden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read all Steven's books, and I like them a lot. This one was no exception—great examples for many different use cases. I really enjoyed and read several times chapter about testing using pytest. If you want to learn about python testing without reading books with many pages, this chapter will give you most of what you need.
Another thing that I like about this book that it's truly embracing new python features, such as data typing. Whole book, every single function uses typing, and in many cases, Steve explains why he decided to use TypedDict instead of NamedTuple or dataclass.
I read this book from beginning to end, and I will continue to use it as a reference.
I also recommend reading and look at the code at GitHub since it has much more code than in the book, where you will learn much more from the code.

[Nickolai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Самый главный недостаток книги - это непонимание, как ее следует читать. Если от корки до корки, то в каждом рецепте очень много повторений из предыдущих разделов. Выбрать же только интересующие тебя рецепты во многих случаях не получится, так как в них есть отсылки к коду из других глав. В результате, выбрав произвольный рецепт, нередко отсылаешься к другому, а потом еще к третьему и так далее. Кроме того, автор льет чересчур много воды, не относящейся к рассматриваемой в каждом разделе теме, и выбирает неоправданно сложные примеры для объяснения даже самых примитивных идей.

[numbworks · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book is organized as a sequence of totally unrelated recipes, and each of them list dozens of methods for each type or argument - for ex. ten ways to chop a string. This book is -extremely boring- and pretty much useless. It also shows commands running in the REPL one by one instead of a .py script, which makes everything very hard to read. It's only good as toilet paper, avoid.