Who this book is for?

This book is suitable for all software engineering practitioners who are interested in software design or learning more about Python. It is assumed that the reader is already familiar with the principles of object-oriented software design and has experience writing code.

It will appeal to team leads, software architects and senior software engineers who want to learn good Python coding techniques to create projects from scratch or work on their legacy systems to save costs and improve efficiency.

The book is organized in such a way that the content is in increasing order of complexity. The first chapters cover the basics of Python, which is a good way to learn the main idioms, functions, and utilities available in the language. The idea is not just to solve some problems with Python, but to do so in an idiomatic way.

Experienced programmers will also benefit from the topics in this book, as some sections cover advanced topics in Python, such as decorators, descriptors, and an introduction to asynchronous programming. It will help the reader discover more about Python because some of the cases are analyzed from the internals of the language itself.

Scientists using Python for data processing can also benefit from the content of this book, and to that end, several parts of the book are dedicated to setting up projects from the ground up, in terms of tools, configuration of environments, and good practices to release software.

It is worth emphasizing the word "practitioners" in the first sentence of this section. This is a book that takes a pragmatic approach. Examples are limited to what the case study requires but are also intended to resemble the context of a real software project. It is not an academic book, and as such the definitions made, the remarks made, and the recommendations are to be taken with caution. The reader is expected to examine these recommendations critically and pragmatically rather than dogmatically. After all, practicality beats purity.