Part III - Intermediate Odds and Ends

In Part III, you will learn about some Python internals that many would consider intermediate-level Python. You have graduated from the milk and you’re ready for some meat! In this section, we will take a look at the following topics:

• Debugging
• Decorators
• The lambda statement
• Profiling your code
• Testing

The first chapter in this section will introduce you to Python’s debugging module, pdb and how to use it to debug your code. The next chapter is all about decorators. You will learn about how to create them and about a few of the decorators that are built into Python. For the third chapter, we will be looking at the lambda statement, which basically creates a one-line anonymous function. It’s a little weird, but fun! The fourth chapter will cover how you profile your code. This discipline gives you the ability to find possible bottlenecks in your code so that you know where to focus to optimize your code. The final chapter in this section is about testing your code. In it you will discover how to test your code using a couple of Python’s own built-in modules.

I think you will find this section very helpful in continuing your Python education. Let’s jump right in!