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

Using reStructuredText files


Plain text, by definition, is limited in what information it can provide; that is, there is no metadata inherent in a text file (apart from what is provided by the filesystem). In other words, there is no way to bold, italicize, or otherwise augment raw text, to provide some sort of contextual information.

A number of markup languages have been developed over the years, with HTML being a prime example this. However, HTML is a little heavy for in-code documentation purposes. Something more like Wikitext (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext) would make more sense, as it uses simple ASCII characters to provide context to raw text. Hence, PEP 287 proposes the reStructuredText (reST) markup be used for structured text documentation within Python docstrings, PEPs, and other documents that require structured markup. Of course, plain text docstrings are not deprecated; reST simply provides more options, for developers who want to be more expressive in their documentation...