Book Image

Mastering Python 2E - Second Edition

By : Rick van Hattem
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Python 2E - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Rick van Hattem

Overview of this book

Even if you find writing Python code easy, writing code that is efficient, maintainable, and reusable is not so straightforward. Many of Python’s capabilities are underutilized even by more experienced programmers. Mastering Python, Second Edition, is an authoritative guide to understanding advanced Python programming so you can write the highest quality code. This new edition has been extensively revised and updated with exercises, four new chapters and updates up to Python 3.10. Revisit important basics, including Pythonic style and syntax and functional programming. Avoid common mistakes made by programmers of all experience levels. Make smart decisions about the best testing and debugging tools to use, optimize your code’s performance across multiple machines and Python versions, and deploy often-forgotten Python features to your advantage. Get fully up to speed with asyncio and stretch the language even further by accessing C functions with simple Python calls. Finally, turn your new-and-improved code into packages and share them with the wider Python community. If you are a Python programmer wanting to improve your code quality and readability, this Python book will make you confident in writing high-quality scripts and taking on bigger challenges
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
19
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Index

Introduction to asyncio

The asyncio library was created to make using asynchronous processing much easier and more predictable. It was meant as a replacement for the asyncore module, which has been available for a very long time (since Python 1.5 even) but was not all that usable. The asyncio library was officially introduced for Python 3.4 and has seen many improvements with each newer Python release since.

In a nutshell, the asyncio library allows you to switch to the execution of a different function whenever you need to wait for I/O operations. So instead of Python waiting for your operating system to finish reading a file for you, blocking the entire application in the process, it can do something useful in a different function in the meantime.

Backward compatibility and async/await statements

Before we continue with any examples, it is important to know how asyncio has changed within Python versions. Even though the asyncio library was only introduced in Python 3...