Book Image

Mastering Python

By : Rick van Hattem
Book Image

Mastering Python

By: Rick van Hattem

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language. It is known for its high readability and hence it is often the first language learned by new programmers. Python being multi-paradigm, it can be used to achieve the same thing in different ways and it is compatible across different platforms. Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient, easy to maintain, and reuse is not so straightforward. This book is an authoritative guide that will help you learn new advanced methods in a clear and contextualised way. It starts off by creating a project-specific environment using venv, introducing you to different Pythonic syntax and common pitfalls before moving on to cover the functional features in Python. It covers how to create different decorators, generators, and metaclasses. It also introduces you to functools.wraps and coroutines and how they work. Later on you will learn to use asyncio module for asynchronous clients and servers. You will also get familiar with different testing systems such as py.test, doctest, and unittest, and debugging tools such as Python debugger and faulthandler. You will learn to optimize application performance so that it works efficiently across multiple machines and Python versions. Finally, it will teach you how to access C functions with a simple Python call. By the end of the book, you will be able to write more advanced scripts and take on bigger challenges.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
6
Generators and Coroutines – Infinity, One Step at a Time
Index

Summary


In this chapter, you learned the most important aspects of writing code that uses ctypes, CFFI, and how to extend the Python functionality using native C. These topics can be extensive enough to fill books on their own, but you should have a grasp of the most important topics now. Even though you are able to create C/C++ extensions now, I still recommend that you avoid these as much as possible. This is because bugs are so easily made by not being careful enough. It is actually likely that at least some of the examples given in this chapter contain bugs when it comes to memory management and can crash your Python interpreter when given the wrong input. Unfortunately, this is a side effect of C. A tiny mistake can have a huge impact.

While building the examples in this chapter, you may have noticed that we used a setup.py file and imported from the setuptools library. This is what the next chapter will cover—packaging your code into an installable Python library and distributing it...