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)
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Other Books You May Enjoy
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Index

CFFI

The CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) library offers options very similar to ctypes, but it’s a bit more direct. Unlike the ctypes library, a C compiler is really a necessity for CFFI. With it comes the opportunity to directly call your C compiler from Python in an easy way. We illustrate by calling printf:

>>> import cffi

>>> ffi = cffi.FFI()
>>> ffi.cdef('int printf(const char* format, ...);')
>>> libc = ffi.dlopen(None)
>>> arg = ffi.new('char[]', b'Printing using CFFI\n')
>>> libc.printf(arg)
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Printing using CFFI

Okay… so that looks a bit weird, right? We had to define how the printf function looks and specify the arguments to printf with a valid C function header. Additionally, we had to specify the C-string as a char[] array manually. With ctypes, that would not be required, but there are several advantages...