Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Michał Jaworski
Book Image

Expert Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Michał Jaworski

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language, used in a wide range of domains by programmers who find it simple, yet powerful. Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is a challenge. The focus of the book is to familiarize you with common conventions, best practices, useful tools and standards used by python professionals on a daily basis when working with code. You will begin with knowing new features in Python 3.5 and quick tricks for improving productivity. Next, you will learn advanced and useful python syntax elements brought to this new version. Using advanced object-oriented concepts and mechanisms available in python, you will learn different approaches to implement metaprogramming. You will learn to choose good names, write packages, and create standalone executables easily. You will also be using some powerful tools such as buildout and vitualenv to release and deploy the code on remote servers for production use. Moving on, you will learn to effectively create Python extensions with C, C++, cython, and pyrex. The important factors while writing code such as code management tools, writing clear documentation, and test-driven development are also covered. You will now dive deeper to make your code efficient with general rules of optimization, strategies for finding bottlenecks, and selected tools for application optimization. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in writing efficient and maintainable code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Expert Python Programming Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Common conventions and practices


There is a set of common conventions and practices for deployment that not every developer may know but that are obvious for anyone who has done some operations in their life. As explained in the chapter introduction, it is crucial to know at least a few of them even if you are not responsible for code deployment and operations because it will allow you to make better design decisions during the development.

The filesystem hierarchy

The most obvious conventions that may come into your mind are probably about filesystem hierarchy and user naming. If you are looking for such suggestions here, then you will be disappointed. There is of course a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard that defines the directory structure and directory contents in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, but it is really hard to find an actual OS distribution that is fully compliant with FHS. If system designers and programmers cannot obey such standards, it is very hard to expect the same from...