With stacks, you’ll effectively see how each call in a recursive function is handled. The way each call is pushed onto the stack and popped off is exactly how the program is run, and it’ll clearly demonstrate how calculating large numbers will take a long time, if not optimized. Illustrating Visualization Using a Call Stack In a call stack, whenever a function call returns a result, a stack frame representing the function call is popped off the stack. Whenever you […]

You’ve probably found at least one blog post where the author reveals that they learned Python in a handful of days and quickly transitioned into a high-paying job. Some of these stories may be true, but they don’t help you prepare for a steady learning marathon. So, how long does it really take to learn Python, and is it worth your time investment? In this article, you’ll learn: What “learning Python” means and how you can measure your progress What […]

When you’re building a Docker image for your Python application, you’re building on top of an existing image—and there are many possible choices. There are OS images like Ubuntu, and there are the many different variants of the python base image. Which one should you use? Which one is better? There are many choices, and it may not be obvious which is the best for your situation. So to help you make a choice that fits your needs, in this […]

In this section, you’ll learn how to define a function that takes an optional argument. Functions with optional arguments offer more flexibility in how you can use them. You can call the function with or without the argument, and if there is no argument in the function call, then a default value is used. Default Values Assigned to Input Parameters You can modify the function add_item() so that the parameter quantity has a default value: # optional_params.py shopping_list = {} […]

If you often work with lists in Python, then you probably know that they don’t perform fast enough when you need to pop and append items on their left end. Python’s collections module provides a class called deque that’s specially designed to provide fast and memory-efficient ways to append and pop item from both ends of the underlying data structure. Python’s deque is a low-level and highly optimized double-ended queue that’s useful for implementing elegant, efficient, and Pythonic queues and […]