Book Image

Mastering Concurrency in Python

By : Quan Nguyen
Book Image

Mastering Concurrency in Python

By: Quan Nguyen

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most popular programming languages, with numerous libraries and frameworks that facilitate high-performance computing. Concurrency and parallelism in Python are essential when it comes to multiprocessing and multithreading; they behave differently, but their common aim is to reduce the execution time. This book serves as a comprehensive introduction to various advanced concepts in concurrent engineering and programming. Mastering Concurrency in Python starts by introducing the concepts and principles in concurrency, right from Amdahl's Law to multithreading programming, followed by elucidating multiprocessing programming, web scraping, and asynchronous I/O, together with common problems that engineers and programmers face in concurrent programming. Next, the book covers a number of advanced concepts in Python concurrency and how they interact with the Python ecosystem, including the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Finally, you'll learn how to solve real-world concurrency problems through examples. By the end of the book, you will have gained extensive theoretical knowledge of concurrency and the ways in which concurrency is supported by the Python language
Table of Contents (22 chapters)

Summary

A thread of execution is the smallest unit of programming commands. In computer science, multithreaded applications allow for multiple threads to exist within the same process simultaneously, in order to implement concurrency and parallelism. Multithreading provides a variety of advantages, in execution time, responsiveness, and the efficiency of resource consumption.

The threading module in Python 3, which is commonly considered superior to the old thread module, provides an efficient, powerful, and high-level API to work with threads while implementing multithreaded applications in Python, including options to spawn new threads dynamically and synchronize threads through different locking mechanisms.

Queuing and priority queuing are important data structures in the field of computer science, and they are essential concepts in concurrent and parallel programming. They...