Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Using the decorators module


With all the functionality that decorators provide, and their common use among Python packages, it's inevitable that someone would create a package just for decorators. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/decorator provides a pip installable package to help when working with decorators.

The decorator module is a very stable (more than 10 years old) tool that provides the ability to preserve decorated functions across different Python versions. The aim of the module is to simplify decorator usage, reduce boilerplate code, and enhance program readability and maintainability. 

Decorators can be broken down into two main types: signature-preserving and signature-changing. The preserving decorators take a function call and return a function as the output, without changing anything about the function call's signature. These decorators are the most common type.

Signature-changing decorators accept a function call, but change the signature when output, or simply return non-callable...