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

Useful decorators


In addition to the ones already mentioned in this chapter, Python comes bundled with a few other useful decorators. There are some that aren't in the standard library (yet?).

Single dispatch – polymorphism in Python

If you've used C++ or Java before, you're probably used to having ad hoc polymorphism available—different functions being called depending on the argument types. Python being a dynamically typed language, most people would not expect the possibility of a single dispatch pattern. Python, however, is a language that is not only dynamically typed but also strongly typed, which means we can rely on the type we receive.

Note

A dynamically typed language does not require strict type definitions. On the other hand, a language such as C would require the following to declare an integer:

int some_integer = 123;

Python simply accepts that your value has a type:

some_integer = 123

As opposed to languages such as JavaScript and PHP, however, Python does very little implicit type...