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

Advanced collections


The following collections are mostly just extensions of base collections, some of them fairly simple and others a bit more advanced. For all of them though, it is important to know the characteristics of the underlying structures. Without understanding them, it will be difficult to comprehend the characteristics of these collections.

There are a few collections that are implemented in native C code for performance reasons, but all of them can easily be implemented in pure Python as well.

ChainMap – the list of dictionaries

Introduced in Python 3.3, ChainMap allows you to combine multiple mappings (dictionaries for example) into one. This is especially useful when combining multiple contexts. For example, when looking for a variable in your current scope, by default, Python will search in locals(), globals(), and lastly builtins.

Normally, you would do something like this:

import builtins

builtin_vars = vars(builtins)
if key in locals():
    value = locals()[key]
elif key...