Preface

The Python programming language is extremely popular and used for a variety of applications. The Python language is designed to make it relatively easy to create small programs. To create more sophisticated software, we need to acquire a number of important programming and software design skills.

This book describes the object-oriented approach to creating programs in Python. It introduces the terminology of object-oriented programming, demonstrating software design and Python programming through step-by-step examples. It describes how to make use of inheritance and composition to build software from individual elements. It shows how to use Python's built-in exceptions and data structures, as well as elements of the Python standard library. A number of common design patterns are described with detailed examples.

This book covers how to write automated tests to confirm that our software works. It also shows how to use the various concurrency libraries available as part of Python; this lets us write software that can make use of multiple cores and multiple processors in a modern computer. An extended case study covers a simple machine learning example, showing a number of alternative solutions to a moderately complicated problem.