Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Michał Jaworski
Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Michał Jaworski

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language, used in a wide range of domains by programmers who find it simple, yet powerful. Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is a challenge. The focus of the book is to familiarize you with common conventions, best practices, useful tools and standards used by python professionals on a daily basis when working with code. You will begin with knowing new features in Python 3.5 and quick tricks for improving productivity. Next, you will learn advanced and useful python syntax elements brought to this new version. Using advanced object-oriented concepts and mechanisms available in python, you will learn different approaches to implement metaprogramming. You will learn to choose good names, write packages, and create standalone executables easily. You will also be using some powerful tools such as buildout and vitualenv to release and deploy the code on remote servers for production use. Moving on, you will learn to effectively create Python extensions with C, C++, cython, and pyrex. The important factors while writing code such as code management tools, writing clear documentation, and test-driven development are also covered. You will now dive deeper to make your code efficient with general rules of optimization, strategies for finding bottlenecks, and selected tools for application optimization. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in writing efficient and maintainable code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Expert Python Programming Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Simplifying


To reduce the complexity of code, the way data is stored is fundamental. You should pick your data structure carefully. This section provides a few examples on how the performance of simple code snippets can be improved by the proper datatypes for the job.

Searching in a list

Due to implementation details of the list type in Python, searching for a specific value in a list isn't a cheap operation. The complexity of the list.index() method is O(n), where n is the number of list elements. Such linear complexity is not especially bad if you don't need to perform many element index lookups, but it can have a negative performance impact if there is a need for many such operations.

If you need fast search over a list, you can try the bisect module from the Python standard library. The functions in this module are mainly designed for inserting or finding insertion indexes for given values in a way that will preserve the order of the already sorted sequence. Anyway, they can be used for...