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

Setting up tooling

Before we begin, it is important to note that this chapter will require a working compiler that plays nicely with your Python interpreter. Unfortunately, these vary from platform to platform. For Linux distributions, this can usually be achieved with one or two commands without much hassle.

For OS X, the experience is often very similar, mostly because the heavy lifting can be offloaded to package management systems such as Homebrew. For Windows, it can be slightly trickier, but that process has been streamlined over the last few years as well.

A good and up-to-date starting point to get the required tooling is the Python Developer’s Guide: https://devguide.python.org/setup/.

For building the actual extensions, the Python manual can be useful: https://docs.python.org/3/extending/building.html.

Do you need C/C++ modules?

In almost all cases, I’m inclined to say that you don’t need C/C++ modules. If you are really strapped...