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 unit tests with pytest


Untested code is broken code. Manual testing is essential to ensuring that our software works as expected and does not contain critical bugs. However, manual testing is severely limited because bugs may be introduced at any time in the code.

Nowadays, automated testing is a standard practice in software engineering. In this recipe, we will briefly cover important aspects of automated testing: unit tests, test-driven development, test coverage, and continuous integration. Following these practices is fundamental in order to produce high-quality software.

Getting ready

Python has a native unit testing module that you can readily use (unittest). Other third-party unit testing packages exist. In this recipe, we will use pytest. It is installed by default in Anaconda, but you can also install it manually with conda install pytest.

How to do it...

  1. Let's write in a first.py file a simple function that returns the first element of a list:

    >>> %%writefile first.py...