With a title like Python One-Liners, one might think that someone wrote a Henny Youngman-esque nerdy jokebook, but such is not the case. Instead, the book by Christian Mayer is how to “write concise, eloquent python like a professional.”
Python One-Liners is all about writing fully functioning programs that exist within one line of code. It aims to become a good resource for beginner and intermediate Python programmers and elevates their programming ability by explaining code and showing how to do it as concisely as possible.
For lapsed and beginning programmers, the first chapter is a refresher course on programming and Python. It explains coding structures and how they are used in every day programming, giving a good resource for how to program Python. It’s a solid resource for anyone who wants to relearn Python or any programmers who know another language and need to know the basics of Python to apply their skills to a new language.
Once the basics are covered, Python One-Liners takes the reader into Python tricks. The tricks show how to manipulate and utilize data efficiently. By learning how data works and how to make the most of it, the knowledge opens up the more complex concepts that are covered in the subsequent chapters.
The following chapters cover data science, machine learning, regular expressions, and algorithms. Each of these chapters covers topics that are considered essential to Python programming, and the strengths of the language to utilize high speed high data processing.
Each chapter is broken down to multiple topics that fall under that umbrella, and are further broken down into three sections. Each concept starts with giving an overview of what the concept is about to do with “the basics,” then it shows the code how to do it in “the code,” and ends with how it works to explain the concept from a more technical perspective with a deeper dive in “how it works.” By breaking down each idea covered in the book into bite sized parts like this, it allows for a deeper understanding of how each works and how Python coding works.
Teaching Python concepts and how they work with a single line of code is a simple way to show how Python coding works and how to design efficient code by breaking each down into its most basic ideas. By taking these ideas and combining them, a programmer can create fully fleshed out programs that can do almost anything. Python One-Liners is a great resource for programmers who want to learn Python or get better with their Python skills.
