Book Image

Learning Python

By : Fabrizio Romano
Book Image

Learning Python

By: Fabrizio Romano

Overview of this book

Learning Python has a dynamic and varied nature. It reads easily and lays a good foundation for those who are interested in digging deeper. It has a practical and example-oriented approach through which both the introductory and the advanced topics are explained. Starting with the fundamentals of programming and Python, it ends by exploring very different topics, like GUIs, web apps and data science. The book takes you all the way to creating a fully fledged application. The book begins by exploring the essentials of programming, data structures and teaches you how to manipulate them. It then moves on to controlling the flow of a program and writing reusable and error proof code. You will then explore different programming paradigms that will allow you to find the best approach to any situation, and also learn how to perform performance optimization as well as effective debugging. Throughout, the book steers you through the various types of applications, and it concludes with a complete mini website built upon all the concepts that you learned.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning Python
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Saving Time and Memory

 

"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."

 
 --Bruce Lee

I love this quote from Bruce Lee, he was such a wise man! Especially, the second part, hack away at the unessential, is to me what makes a computer program elegant. After all, if there is a better way of doing things so that we don't waste time or memory, why not?

Sometimes, there are valid reasons for not pushing our code up to the maximum limit: for example, sometimes to achieve a negligible improvement, we have to sacrifice on readability or maintainability. Does it make any sense to have a web page served in 1 second with unreadable, complicated code, when we can serve it in 1.05 seconds with readable, clean code? No, it makes no sense.

On the other hand, sometimes it's perfectly licit to try and shave off a millisecond from a function, especially when the function is meant to be called thousands of times. Every millisecond you save there means one second saved...