Book Image

Python High Performance, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Dr. Gabriele Lanaro
Book Image

Python High Performance, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Dr. Gabriele Lanaro

Overview of this book

Python is a versatile language that has found applications in many industries. The clean syntax, rich standard library, and vast selection of third-party libraries make Python a wildly popular language. Python High Performance is a practical guide that shows how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries to build robust applications. The book explains how to use various profilers to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. The reader will learn how to effectively use NumPy and Cython to speed up numerical code. The book explains concepts of concurrent programming and how to implement robust and responsive applications using Reactive programming. Readers will learn how to write code for parallel architectures using Tensorflow and Theano, and use a cluster of computers for large-scale computations using technologies such as Dask and PySpark. By the end of the book, readers will have learned to achieve performance and scale from their Python applications.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Pandas

Pandas is a library originally developed by Wes McKinney, which was designed to analyze datasets in a seamless and performant way. In recent years, this powerful library has seen an incredible growth and huge adoption by the Python community. In this section, we will introduce the main concepts and tools provided in this library, and we will use it to increase performance of various usecases that can't otherwise be addressed with NumPy's vectorized operations and broadcasting.

Pandas fundamentals

While NumPy deals mostly with arrays, Pandas main data structures are pandas.Series, pandas.DataFrame, and pandas.Panel. In the rest of this chapter, we will abbreviate pandas with pd.

The main difference between a pd.Series object and an np.array is that...