Book Image

Advanced Python Programming

By : Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis
Book Image

Advanced Python Programming

By: Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis

Overview of this book

This Learning Path shows you how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries for building robust and responsive applications. You will learn about profilers and reactive programming, concurrency and parallelism, as well as tools for making your apps quick and efficient. You will discover how to write code for parallel architectures using TensorFlow and Theano, and use a cluster of computers for large-scale computations using technologies such as Dask and PySpark. With the knowledge of how Python design patterns work, you will be able to clone objects, secure interfaces, dynamically choose algorithms, and accomplish much more in high performance computing. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the skills and confidence to build engaging models that quickly offer efficient solutions to your problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Python High Performance - Second Edition by Gabriele Lanaro • Mastering Concurrency in Python by Quan Nguyen • Mastering Python Design Patterns by Sakis Kasampalis
Table of Contents (41 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

A quick analogy


Asynchronous programming is a model of programming that focuses on coordinating different tasks in an application. Its goal is to ensure that the application finishes executing those tasks in the smallest amount of time possible. From this perspective, asynchronous programming is about switching from one task to another when it is appropriate to create overlapping between waiting and processing time, and from there, shorten the total time taken to finish the whole program.

To understand the underlying idea of asynchronous programming, let's consider a quick, real-life analogy. Imagine a scenario in which you are cooking a three-course meal that contains the following:

  • An appetizer that will take 2 minutes of preparation and 3 minutes of cooking/waiting
  • A main course that will take 5 minutes of preparation and 10 minutes of cooking/waiting
  • A dessert that will take 3 minutes of preparation and 5 minutes of cooking/waiting

Now, considering the order in which the courses finish cooking...