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Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

You're reading from   Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications A fun, project-based guide to learning Python 3 while building real-world apps

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789535365
Length 482 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Authors (2):
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Philipp Kats Philipp Kats
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Philipp Kats
David Katz David Katz
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David Katz
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Table of Contents (26) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Getting Started with Python
2. Preparing the Workspace FREE CHAPTER 3. First Steps in Coding - Variables and Data Types 4. Functions 5. Data Structures 6. Loops and Other Compound Statements 7. First Script – Geocoding with Web APIs 8. Scraping Data from the Web with Beautiful Soup 4 9. Simulation with Classes and Inheritance 10. Shell, Git, Conda, and More – at Your Command 11. Section 2: Hands-On with Data
12. Python for Data Applications 13. Data Cleaning and Manipulation 14. Data Exploration and Visualization 15. Training a Machine Learning Model 16. Improving Your Model – Pipelines and Experiments 17. Section 3: Moving to Production
18. Packaging and Testing with Poetry and PyTest 19. Data Pipelines with Luigi 20. Let's Build a Dashboard 21. Serving Models with a RESTful API 22. Serverless API Using Chalice 23. Best Practices and Python Performance 24. Assessments 25. Other Books You May Enjoy

Chapter 8

What are classes? When should we use them?

Classes represent a way in which we can create complex objects, with the corresponding data (attributes) and functions (methods). Classes are a useful concept to represent any entity, such as a database connection, file object, algorithm, and so on. There's also a set of special methods and variables that's used by Python to change the behavior of certain instances.

Can we compare two instances of a class or use arithmetic operations with them?

Yes—this is one of the use cases for special methods. For example, in order for us to check instances for equality, we need to set the __eq__ method of the class. Here, we are checking whether the instance is greater, smaller, and so on—there is a corresponding special method for each operation.

When should we use inheritance?

Inheritance is an important property...

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