Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Concurrency is the ability to run two or more tasks in the same time span, whether they are parallel or not. Python provides many tools to implement concurrency and asynchronous behaviors: threads, coroutines, and processes. While some of them don't allow real parallelism due to their design (coroutines), or due to a Global Interpreter Lock (threads), they are very easy to use and can be leveraged to perform parallel I/O operations or to interleave functions with minimum effort. When real parallelism is required, multiprocessing is easy enough in Python to be a viable solution for any kind of software.

This chapter will cover the most common ways to achieve concurrency in Python, will show you how to perform asynchronous tasks that will wait in the background for certain conditions, and how to share data between processes.