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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20
Index

Mathematics and precise calculations

Python has a decent number of mathematical functions and features built in, but there are cases where you need more advanced features or something faster. In this section, we will discuss a few libraries that help by introducing many extra mathematical functions and/or increase mathematical precision and/or performance quite a bit.

First, let’s discuss the options in the Python core libraries to store numbers and perform calculations with varying precision:

  • int: To store whole numbers (e.g. 1, 2, 3), we have the int object in Python. The int is directly translated into a C int64 on most systems as long as it can fit within 64-bit. Outside of that, it is internally cast to a Python long type (not to be confused with a C long), which can be arbitrarily large. This allows for infinite accuracy but only works as long as you use whole numbers.
  • fractions.Fraction: The Fraction object makes it possible to store fractional numbers...