Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Cyrille Rossant
Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Cyrille Rossant

Overview of this book

Python is one of the leading open source platforms for data science and numerical computing. IPython and the associated Jupyter Notebook offer efficient interfaces to Python for data analysis and interactive visualization, and they constitute an ideal gateway to the platform. IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook, Second Edition contains many ready-to-use, focused recipes for high-performance scientific computing and data analysis, from the latest IPython/Jupyter features to the most advanced tricks, to help you write better and faster code. You will apply these state-of-the-art methods to various real-world examples, illustrating topics in applied mathematics, scientific modeling, and machine learning. The first part of the book covers programming techniques: code quality and reproducibility, code optimization, high-performance computing through just-in-time compilation, parallel computing, and graphics card programming. The second part tackles data science, statistics, machine learning, signal and image processing, dynamical systems, and pure and applied mathematics.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization CookbookSecond Edition
Contributors
Preface
Index

Writing high-quality Python code


Writing code is easy. Writing high-quality code is much harder. Quality is to be understood both in terms of actual code (variable names, comments, docstrings, and so on) and architecture (functions, modules, and classes). In general, coming up with a well-designed code architecture is much more challenging than the implementation itself.

In this recipe, we will give a few tips about how to write high-quality code. This is a particularly important topic in academia, as more and more scientists without prior experience in software development need to code.

How to do it...

  1. Take the time to learn the Python language seriously. Review the list of all modules in the standard library—you may discover that functions you implemented already exist. Learn to write Pythonic code, and do not translate programming idioms from other languages such as Java or C++ to Python.

  2. Learn common design patterns; these are general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in...