Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Reviewing containers


Before we get into collections, we will take a little bit of time to review the existing containers so we know what is, and is not, provided with them. This will allow us to better understand the capabilities and potential limitations of collections.

Sequence types include lists, tuples, and ranges, though only lists and tuples are relevant here. Sequence types include the __iter___ function by default, so they can naturally iterate over the sequence of objects they contain.

Lists are mutable sequences, that is, they can be modified in-place. They most commonly hold homogeneous items, but this is not a requirement. Lists are probably the most common container to be used in Python, as it is easy to add new items to a list by simply using <list>.append to extend the sequence.

Tuples are immutable, meaning they cannot be modified in-place and a new tuple must be created if a modification is to occur. They frequently hold heterogeneous data, such as capturing multiple...