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

Caching

When some of your application functions takes too long to compute, a useful technique to consider is caching. Caching saves the return values of function calls, database queries, HTTP requests, and so on for future reference. The result of a function or method that is expensive to run can be cached as long as the following prerequisites are met:

  • The function is deterministic and the results have the same value every time, given the same input
  • The return value of the function is nondeterministic but continues to be useful and valid for some period of time

In other words, a deterministic function always returns the same result for the same set of arguments, whereas a nondeterministic function returns results that may vary in time. Caching both types of results usually greatly reduces the time of computation and allows you to save a lot of computer resources.

The most important...