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

Wheels – the new eggs


For pure Python packages, the sdist (source distribution) command has always been enough. For C/C++ packages however, it is usually not that convenient. The problem with C/C++ packages is that compilation is needed unless you use a binary package. Traditionally those were generally the .egg files but they never really solved the issue quite right. That is why the wheel format has been introduced (PEP 0427), a binary package format that contains both source and binaries and can install on both Windows and OS X without requiring a compiler. As an added bonus, it installs faster for pure Python packages as well.

Implementation is luckily simple. First, install the wheel package:

# pip install wheel

Now you'll be able to use the bdist_wheel command to build your packages. The only small gotcha is that by default the packages created by Python 3 will only work on Python 3, so Python 2 installations will fall back to the sdist file. To fix that, you can add the following to...