Great book on a very important topic.Python is complex language with even more complex environment and its module system is the critical part of it. For example Python standard library is structured as a collection of modules. The author gives you an excellent overview of Python module system, gives important recommendation about creation of your own modules (and provide several examples, including generator example in chapter 4, as well as warns about gotchas. Interplay between modules and namespaces covered in Chapter 7 is alone worth several times of the price of the book. for example few understand that the import statement adds the imported module or package to the current namespace, which may or may not be the global namespace. the author also covers the problem of "name masking" in this chapter.Ability to write a large script using your own modules is a very important skill that few books teach. usually intro books on Python try to throw everything that language contains into the sink, creating problems for whose who study the language, even in cases when they already knew some other programming languages such as C++ or Perl. Ability not to cover some features of the language usually are complete absent in authors of such books.Most of the authors of Python books talks a lot about how great Python is, but never explain why. this books explains probably the most important feature of this scripting language which makes is great (actually inhered from Modula 3). Also most intro books suffer from excessive fascination with OO (thanks God this fad is past its peak). This book does not.Publishing of books that are devoted to important topics has great value as:you have nowhere to go to get information that it provides. But it is very risky business. Of cause if you are diligent you can collect this information by reading a dozen of book by extracting and organizing into some presentation relevant parts. But this is the work better reserved for personalities which corresponds to famous Sherlock Holms and it presuppose that you have pretty of time to do it. Usually meeting both of those two conditions is pretty unrealistic.So it takes a certain about of courage to write a book devoted to a single specific feature of Python and the author should be commended for that.That's why I highly recommend this book for anybody who is trying to learn the language. It really allow you to understand a single the most critical feature of the Python language.The book contain 9 chapters. Here are the titles of those chapters:1. Introducing Modular Programming2. Writing Your First Modular Program3. Using Modules and Packages4. Using Modules for Real-World Programming5. Working with Module Patterns6. Creating Reusable Modules7. Advanced Module Techniques8. Testing and Deploying Modules9. Modular Programming as a Foundation for Good Programming TechniqueNOTE: In chapter 8 the author covers unrelated but an important topic about how to prepare your modules to publication and upload them to GitHub. Using GitHub became now very popular among Python programmers and the earlier you learn about this possibility the better.Chapter 8 also covers important topic about installation of Python packages. But unfortunately the coverage is way to brief and does not cover gotchas that you might experience installing such packages as Numpy.I would like to stress it again: currently the book has no competition in the level of coverage of this, probably the most important feature of Python language.

Earlier this year or late 2015, Packt Publishing asked me to be technical reviewer for a book called “Modular Programming with Python” by Erik Westra. It sounded really interesting and it ended up being one of the best books I’ve read from Packt. Note that I am the sole technical reviewer of the book.Modular Programming with Python is actually quite fun to read. It is designed to help you learn how to make your code more modular and gives some really good examples. The first chapter begins by going over the way Python itself organizes its modules and packages. It goes on to explain why modular programming can be important and it has a neat example of creating your very own module, which happens to be a caching module.The second chapter is all about creating your first modular program. It takes you through the steps you might go through to design a program in a modular fashion and then actually implements it. During the design phase, the author just stubs out the interface. Then in the implementation phase we get to actually add the code.For chapter three, we learn how modules and packages are initialized. The author also goes over Python’s importing system. We learn how imports work, what relative imports are, controlling what gets imported, circular imports and more.Chapter four is about creating a modular charting package. We learn how to chart using the pillow package, which is a fork of the Python Imaging Library (PIL). Then the author talks about how requirements for a projects change and how we must respond to them. In this example, we need a way to do vector images which pillow doesn’t support. So the author shows how to add the ability to create charts using Reportlab or pillow. This is also a really great chapter.Chapter five looks at modular patterns, like encapsulation, wrappers, etc. I think the part I found most interesting was the portion of the chapter that covered dynamic imports, plugins and hooks.In Chapter six, we learn about reusable modules. The author first describes what a reusable module is and then gives some examples. The rest of the chapter is devoted to creating a reusable module which happens to be a unit conversion module.Chapter seven digs even more into Python’s importing system. It covers such items as optional imports, local imports, adding packages to sys.path, various import “gotchas”, dealing with globals and more. This was actually one of my favorite chapters.For chapter eight, we get a change of pace. It’s all about testing our modules and deploying them. The chapter only gives the basics on unit tests, code coverage and test driven development. The bulk of the chapter is about getting a module ready for publication to Github or the Python Package Index.The final chapter is supposed to demonstrate how modular programming techniques can make the process of programming itself more effective. It gives a pretty short example and wraps up the book.Overall I found this book conveyed its message very well. The code examples are straight-forward and easy to understand. The writing is very good. Much better than what I normally see in Packt publications. I love reading neat or just interesting code and this book has several great examples. I did feel like the book ended a bit abruptly. While I don’t know what should have been added, I just felt like it could have had another chapter or two. Regardless, I do recommend this book to anyone who is having trouble organizing their code.

This is a great book for understanding how to organize your python applications.The only thing I didn't like was. The author was hell bent on not using classes at all.Like there was an example where using class would have made the examples easier but the author used all functions with globals and locals. It was weird.While I understand that the author probably did that so it would be easier for beginners?But then again when your buying a book about how to program organize your code modularly.Chances are you already know what a class is.I just seriously don't understand the forced avoidance with classes in the examples.Other than that the book is great