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


For some reason, functional programming is a paradigm that scares many people, but really it shouldn't. The most important difference between functional and procedural programming (within Python) is the mindset. Everything is executed using simple (and often translations of the mathematical equivalent) functions without any storage of variables. Simply put, a functional program consists of many functions having a simple input and output, without using (or even having) any outside scope or context to access. Python is not a purely functional language, so it is easy to cheat and work outside of the local scope, but that is not recommended.

This chapter covered the basics of functional programming within Python and some of the mathematics behind it. In addition to this, some of the many useful libraries that can be used in a very convenient way by using functional programming were covered.

The most important outtakes should be the following:

  • Lambda statements are not inherently bad but...