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

Documenting code


There are currently three different documentation styles supported by Sphinx: the original Sphinx style and the more recent NumPy and Google styles. The differences between them are mainly in style but it's actually slightly more than that.

The Sphinx style was developed using a bunch of reStructuredText roles, a very effective method but when used a lot it can be detrimental for readability. You can probably tell what the following does but it's not the nicest syntax:

:param amount: The amount of eggs to return
:type amount: int

The Google style was (as the name suggests) developed by Google. The goal was to have a simple/readable format which works both as in-code documentation and parse able for Sphinx. In my opinion, this comes closer to the original idea of reStructuredText, a format that's very close to how you would document instinctively. This example has the same meaning as the Sphinx style example shown earlier:

Args:
    amount (int): The amount of eggs to return...