Python’s simplicity lets you become productive quickly, but often this means you aren’t using everything it has to offer. With the updated edition of this hands-on guide, you’ll learn how to write effective, modern Python 3 code by leveraging its best ideas.

Don’t waste time bending Python to fit patterns you learned in other languages. Discover and apply idiomatic Python 3 features beyond your past experience. Author Luciano Ramalho guides you through Python’s core language features and libraries and teaches you how to make your code shorter, faster, and more readable.

Featuring major updates throughout the book, Fluent Python, second edition, covers:

Special methods: The key to the consistent behavior of Python objects

Data structures: Sequences, dicts, sets, Unicode, and data classes

Functions as objects: First-class functions, related design patterns, and type hints in function declarations

Object-oriented idioms: Composition, inheritance, mixins, interfaces, operator overloading, static typing and protocols

Control flow: Context managers, generators, coroutines, async/await, and thread/process pools

Metaprogramming: Properties, attribute descriptors, class decorators, and new class metaprogramming hooks that are simpler than metaclasses


Luciano Ramalho was a Web developer before the Netscape IPO in 1995, and switched from Perl to Java to Python in 1998. Since then he worked on some of the largest news portals in Brazil using Python, and taught Python web development in the Brazilian media, banking and government sectors. He has presented multiple talks at PyCon US, OSCON, FISL, Rupy, QCon and PythonBrasil. Ram...