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

Package versioning

While there are many versioning schemes available, many Python packages, and Python itself, use PEP-440 for the version specifications.

Some people adhere to the slightly stricter version called semantic versioning (SemVer), but the two are largely compatible.

The short and simplified explanation is that version numbers such as 1.2 or 1.2.3 are used. For instance, looking at version 1.2.3:

  • 1 is the major version and indicates API-breaking incompatible changes
  • 2 is the minor version and indicates backward-compatible functionality addition
  • 3 is the patch version, which is used for backward-compatible bugfixes

In the case of major versions, some libraries opt for making the versions non-contiguous and use dates for the versions, such as 2022.5.

Pre-releases such as alphas and betas can be specified through the minor version with letters. The options are a for alpha, b for beta, and rc for release candidate. This...