Functional Python Programming - Third Edition

 1 Understanding Functional Programming

Functional programming defines a computation using expressions and evaluation; often, they are encapsulated in function definitions. It de-emphasizes or avoids the complexity of state change and mutable objects. This tends to create programs that are more succinct and expressive. In this chapter, we’ll introduce some of the techniques that characterize functional programming. We’ll identify some of the ways to map these features to Python. Finally, we’ll also address some ways in which the benefits of functional programming accrue when we use these design patterns to build Python applications.

This book doesn’t contain a tutorial introduction to the Python language. We assume the reader knows some Python. ...