Book Image

Python High Performance, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Dr. Gabriele Lanaro
Book Image

Python High Performance, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Dr. Gabriele Lanaro

Overview of this book

Python is a versatile language that has found applications in many industries. The clean syntax, rich standard library, and vast selection of third-party libraries make Python a wildly popular language. Python High Performance is a practical guide that shows how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries to build robust applications. The book explains how to use various profilers to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. The reader will learn how to effectively use NumPy and Cython to speed up numerical code. The book explains concepts of concurrent programming and how to implement robust and responsive applications using Reactive programming. Readers will learn 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. By the end of the book, readers will have learned to achieve performance and scale from their Python applications.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

Asynchronous programming is useful when our code deals with slow and unpredictable resources, such as I/O devices and networks. In this chapter, we explored the fundamental concepts of concurrency and asynchronous programming and how to write concurrent code with the asyncio and RxPy libraries.

asyncio coroutines are an excellent choice when dealing with multiple, interconnected resources as they greatly simplify the code logic by cleverly avoiding callbacks. Reactive programming is also very good in these situations, but it truly shines when dealing with streams of data that are common in real-time applications and user interfaces.

In the next two chapters, we will learn about parallel programming and how to achieve impressive performance gain by taking advantage of multiple cores and multiple machines.