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Practical Maya Programming with Python

You're reading from   Practical Maya Programming with Python Unleash the power of Python in Maya and unlock your creativity

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2014
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781849694728
Length 352 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Robert Galanakis Robert Galanakis
Author Profile Icon Robert Galanakis
Robert Galanakis
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Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introspecting Maya, Python, and PyMEL FREE CHAPTER 2. Writing Composable Code 3. Dealing with Errors 4. Leveraging Context Managers and Decorators in Maya 5. Building Graphical User Interfaces for Maya 6. Automating Maya from the Outside 7. Taming the Maya API 8. Unleashing the Maya API through Python 9. Becoming a Part of the Python Community A. Python Best Practices Index

Introducing decorators


Decorators are the single most unfortunately explained language feature of Python. An improved way to teach decorators was presented by Steve Ferg on his blog: http://pythonconquerstheuniverse.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/python-decorators/. I've adapted his suggestions for use in this section.

Decorators associate setup and teardown functionality with some callable object. In the preceding example, we associated the functionality of "each time some function is called, it can be undone as a single block" with the makefoot function. There is no way to call makefoot without this new behavior added by the decorator.

Explaining decorators

I find it easiest to explain decorators by working from very basic Python and eventually ending with the funky @ line that goes above a function.

In Python, anything with a __call__ method is known as a callable. Functions are one type of callable. There is basically no difference between calling something directly, and invoking its __call__...

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