A range is a Python object that represents an interval of integers. Usually, the numbers are consecutive, but you can also specify that you want to space them out. You can create ranges by calling range() with one, two, or three arguments, as the following examples show: In each example, you use list() to explicitly list the individual elements of each range. You’ll study these examples in more detail soon. A range can sometimes be a powerful tool. However, throughout […]

If you’re writing scientific or data science code with Python, there’s a good chance you’re using NumPy, directly or indirectly. Pandas, Scikit-Image, SciPy, Scikit-Learn, AstroPy… these and many other packages depend on NumPy. NumPy 2 is a new major release, with a release candidate coming out February 1st 2024, and a final release a month or two later. Importantly, it’s backwards incompatible; not in a major way, but enough that some work might be required to upgrade. And that means […]

Python is always getting better, and 2023 brought a number of exciting developments. As part of the Faster CPython project, Python 3.12 is speedier than previous versions. The new release brings improved error messages and more powerful f-strings. You can also enjoy support for the Linux perf profiler, static typing improvements, and changes to subinterpreters. The Python Software Foundation (PSF) focused on enhancing security in 2023, with the help of inaugural Security Developer-in-Residence Seth Michael Larson. As part of this […]

As a Python developer who wants to harness the power of object-oriented programming, you’ll love to learn how to customize your classes using special methods, also known as magic methods or dunder methods. A special method is a method whose name starts and ends with a double underscore. These methods have special meanings for Python. Python automatically calls magic methods as a response to certain operations, such as instantiation, sequence indexing, attribute managing, and much more. Magic methods support core […]

When you start your programming adventure, one of the most fundamental concepts that you encounter early on is the array. If you’ve recently switched to Python from another programming language, then you might be surprised that arrays are nowhere to be found as a built-in syntactical construct in Python. Instead of arrays, you typically use lists, which are slightly different and more flexible than classic arrays. That said, Python ships with the lesser-known array module in its standard library, providing […]

After implementing the main functionality of a web project, you may find that your app is rough around the edges. Often, this boils down to the user experience (UX) of your project. For example, when you send a form, you don’t receive a success message, although everything worked fine. You want to build an immersive experience, but wrong URLs display unwelcoming error messages. Luckily, you can get valuable information from Flask through logging. As an admin of a web project, […]

When you’re running a CPU-intensive parallel program, you often want to have a thread or process pool sized by the number of CPU cores on your machine. Fewer threads and you’re not taking advantage of all the cores, more than that and your program will start running slower as multiple threads compete for the same core. Or that’s the theory, anyway. So how do you check how many cores your computer has? And is this actually good advice? It turns […]