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

Summary


This chapter showed us what the Pythonic philosophy is all about and explained to us what the Zen of Python is all about. While code style is highly personal, Python has a few, very helpful guidelines that at least keep people mostly on the same page and style. In the end, we are all consenting adults; everyone has the right to write code as he/she sees fit. But I do request you. Please read through the style guides and try to adhere to them unless you have a really good reason not to.

With all that power comes great responsibility, and so do a few pitfalls, though there aren't too many. Some are tricky enough to fool me regularly and I've been writing Python for a long time! Python improves all the time though. Many pitfalls have been taken care of since Python 2, but some will always remain. For example, recursive imports and definitions can easily bite you in most languages that support them, but that doesn't mean we'll stop trying to improve Python.

A good example of the improvements...