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

Functional programming


Functional programming is a paradigm that originates from the lambda calculus. Without diving too much into the lambda calculus (λ-calculus), this roughly means that computation is performed through the use of mathematical functions, which avoids mutable data and changing state of surroundings. The idea of a strictly functional language is that all function outputs are dependent only on the input and not on any external state. Since Python is not strictly a programming language, this doesn't necessarily hold true, but it is a good idea to adhere to this paradigm as mixing these can cause unforeseen bugs as discussed in Chapter 2, Pythonic Syntax, Common Pitfalls, and Style Guide.

Even outside of functional programming, this is a good idea. Keeping functions purely functional (relying only on the given input) makes code clearer, easier to understand, and better to test as there are less dependencies. Well-known examples can be found within the math module. These functions...