Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Python

By : Elliot Forbes
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Python

By: Elliot Forbes

Overview of this book

Python is a very high level, general purpose language that is utilized heavily in fields such as data science and research, as well as being one of the top choices for general purpose programming for programmers around the world. It features a wide number of powerful, high and low-level libraries and frameworks that complement its delightful syntax and enable Python programmers to create. This book introduces some of the most popular libraries and frameworks and goes in-depth into how you can leverage these libraries for your own high-concurrent, highly-performant Python programs. We'll cover the fundamental concepts of concurrency needed to be able to write your own concurrent and parallel software systems in Python. The book will guide you down the path to mastering Python concurrency, giving you all the necessary hardware and theoretical knowledge. We'll cover concepts such as debugging and exception handling as well as some of the most popular libraries and frameworks that allow you to create event-driven and reactive systems. By the end of the book, you'll have learned the techniques to write incredibly efficient concurrent systems that follow best practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Understanding concurrency


Concurrency is, essentially, the practice of doing multiple things at the same time, but not, specifically, in parallel. It can help us to improve the perceived performance of our applications, and it can also improve the speed at which our applications run.

The best way to think of how concurrency works is to imagine one person working on multiple tasks and quickly switching between these tasks. Imagine this one person working concurrently on a program, and, at the same time, dealing with support requests. This person would focus primarily on the writing of their program, and quickly context switch to fixing a bug or dealing with a support issue should there be one. Once they complete the support task, they could switch context again, back to writing their program really quickly.

However, in computing, there are typically two performance bottlenecks that we have to watch out for and guard against when writing our programs. It's important to know the differences between...