Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

By : Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé
Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

By: Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language that's used in a wide range of domains thanks to its simple yet powerful nature. Although writing Python code is easy, making it readable, reusable, and easy to maintain is challenging. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, the third edition of Expert Python Programming will help you overcome this challenge. The book will start by taking you through the new features in Python 3.7. You'll then learn the advanced components of Python syntax, in addition to understanding how to apply concepts of various programming paradigms, including object-oriented programming, functional programming, and event-driven programming. This book will also guide you through learning the naming best practices, writing your own distributable Python packages, and getting up to speed with automated ways to deploy your software on remote servers. You’ll discover how to create useful Python extensions with C, C++, Cython, and CFFI. Furthermore, studying about code management tools, writing clear documentation, and exploring test-driven development will help you write clean code. By the end of the book, you will have become an expert in writing efficient and maintainable Python code.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Before You Start
4
Section 2: Python Craftsmanship
12
Section 3: Quality over Quantity
16
Section 4: Need for Speed
20
Section 5: Technical Architecture
23
reStructuredText Primer

Writing extensions

As already said, writing extensions is not a simple task but, in return for your hard work, it can give you a lot of advantages. The easiest approach to creating extensions is to use tools such as Cython or Pyrex. These projects will increase your productivity and also make code easier to develop, read, and maintain.

Anyway, if you are new to this topic, it is good to start your adventure with extensions by writing one using nothing more than bare C language and Python/C API. This will improve your understanding of how extensions work and will also help you to appreciate the advantages of alternative solutions. For the sake of simplicity, we will take a simple algorithmic problem as an example and try to implement it using the two following different approaches:

  • Writing a pure C extension
  • Using Cython

Our problem will be finding the nth number of the Fibonacci...