September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
350 pages
9h 38m
English
Content preview from Practical Programming, 2nd Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,







O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Functions That Python Provides
Python comes with many built-in functions that perform common operations. One example is abs, which produces the absolute value of a number:
| | >>> abs(-9) |
| | 9 |
| | >>> abs(3.3) |
| | 3.3 |
Each of these statements is a function call.
The general form of a function call is as follows:
| | function_name(arguments) |
An argument is an expression that appears between the parentheses of a function call. In abs(-9), the argument is -9.
Here, we calculate the difference between a day temperature and a night temperature, as might ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access