04 January 2018

"Learning Python by Mark Lutz" - Reading Journal 4 [Chapter 6 and Chapter 7]

Learning Python by Mark Lutz Fifth Edition
Learning Python by Mark Lutz
Like me, if you are new to Python and want to ramp-up to become no non-sense developer in Python, you might want to read these posts (and if you are prepared to take up the tough path of mastering the language). The post like this is my experience - the journey that is little longer but interesting, thought-provoking and rewarding. 

For next few months, I would be posting my experiences with Python more specifically the learning I am going through from the book - "Learning Python by Mark Lutz". You can find all of my reading journal of this book.

The rest of this post covers what I learned in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.

Chapter 6: The Dynamic Typing Interlude
This chapter provides an excellent coverage of dynamic types, objects, variables and a picture on how the objects are created in memory. Dynamic typing - how Python detects the type (or rather where it stores the type of the object), the significance of variable names, object reference counts and where the variable names are stored are discussed. A brief walkthrough on automatic reclaim of memory (aka Garbage Collection) and GC in the context of shared references, shared references and In-place changes and shared references and equality are discussed. If you are from the language like Java, you should be knowing most of the concepts already. Overall a nice theoretical view of PVM memory and object space. Nice and neat chapter

Chapter 7: String Fundamentals
If you like strings and string manipulation - I bet you will like this chapter. What appears as simple (when we do no know) becomes quite overwhleming when we go deeper. This chapter is written in such a way that it never overwhelms with a lot of friendly advices. Do not miss this chapter if you are a fan of strings. Let us come what I learned. String, why string is a sequence, string liternals, escape sequences, raw strings, unicode representation, how to express strings (three different ways), indexing, slicing, extended slicing, conversion, changing strings, immutablity, string methods, string module (which you should be using), formatting expressions. After reading the chapter, I feel that this is one of the chapters that I should read few times. I am sure that strings will take some time to master. Overall, the chapter is nice, informative. Kudos to the author again.

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