Book Image

Python Unlocked

By : Arun Tigeraniya
Book Image

Python Unlocked

By: Arun Tigeraniya

Overview of this book

Python is a versatile programming language that can be used for a wide range of technical tasks—computation, statistics, data analysis, game development, and more. Though Python is easy to learn, it’s range of features means there are many aspects of it that even experienced Python developers don’t know about. Even if you’re confident with the basics, its logic and syntax, by digging deeper you can work much more effectively with Python – and get more from the language. Python Unlocked walks you through the most effective techniques and best practices for high performance Python programming - showing you how to make the most of the Python language. You’ll get to know objects and functions inside and out, and will learn how to use them to your advantage in your programming projects. You will also find out how to work with a range of design patterns including abstract factory, singleton, strategy pattern, all of which will help make programming with Python much more efficient. Finally, as the process of writing a program is never complete without testing it, you will learn to test threaded applications and run parallel tests. If you want the edge when it comes to Python, use this book to unlock the secrets of smarter Python programming.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Python Unlocked
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Writing optimized code


Key 1: Easy optimizations for code.

We should pay close attention to not use loops inside loops, giving us quadratic behavior. We can use built-ins, such as map, ZIP, and reduce, instead of using loops if possible. For example, in the following code, the one with map is faster because the looping is implicit and done at C level. By plotting their run times respectively on graph as test 1 and test 2, we see that it is nearly constant for PyPy but reduces a lot for CPython, as follows:

def sqrt_1(ll):
    """simple for loop"""
    res = []
    for i in ll:
        res.append(math.sqrt(i))
    return res

def sqrt_2(ll):
    "builtin map"
    return list(map(math.sqrt,ll))
The test 1 is for sqrt_1(list(range(1000))) and test 22 sqrt_2(list(range(1000))).

The following image is a graphical representation of the preceding code:

Generators should be used, when the result that is consumed is averagely smaller than the total result consumed. In other words, the result that is...