Book Image

Mastering Python

By : Rick van Hattem
Book Image

Mastering Python

By: Rick van Hattem

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language. It is known for its high readability and hence it is often the first language learned by new programmers. Python being multi-paradigm, it can be used to achieve the same thing in different ways and it is compatible across different platforms. Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient, easy to maintain, and reuse is not so straightforward. This book is an authoritative guide that will help you learn new advanced methods in a clear and contextualised way. It starts off by creating a project-specific environment using venv, introducing you to different Pythonic syntax and common pitfalls before moving on to cover the functional features in Python. It covers how to create different decorators, generators, and metaclasses. It also introduces you to functools.wraps and coroutines and how they work. Later on you will learn to use asyncio module for asynchronous clients and servers. You will also get familiar with different testing systems such as py.test, doctest, and unittest, and debugging tools such as Python debugger and faulthandler. You will learn to optimize application performance so that it works efficiently across multiple machines and Python versions. Finally, it will teach you how to access C functions with a simple Python call. By the end of the book, you will be able to write more advanced scripts and take on bigger challenges.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
6
Generators and Coroutines – Infinity, One Step at a Time
Index

Installing packages


Before we actually get started, it is important to know how to install a package properly. There are at least four different options for installing a package. The first and most obvious is by using the plain pip command:

pip install package

This can also be achieved by using setup.py directly:

cd package
python setup.py install

This installs the package within your Python environment which would be the likely virtualenv/venv if you are using it or the global environment otherwise.

For development however, this is not recommended. To test your code, you would need to either reinstall the package for every test or modify the files within the Python's site-packages directory, which would mean it would be outside of your revision control system as well. That's where the development installs come in; instead of copying the package files to the Python package directory, they simply install a link within the site-packages directory to the path where the package is actually located...