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

Generators and Coroutines – Infinity, One Step at a Time

Generator functions are functions that behave like iterators by generating the return values one by one. While traditional methods build and return a list or tuple of items with a fixed length, a generator will yield a single value only when requested by the caller. The side effect is that these generators can be infinitely large because you can keep yielding forever.

In addition to generators, there is a variation to the generator’s syntax that creates coroutines. Coroutines are functions that allow multitasking without requiring multiple threads or processes. Whereas generators can only yield values to the caller based on the initial arguments, coroutines enable two-way communication with the calling function while running. The modern implementation of coroutines in Python is through the asyncio module, which is covered extensively in Chapter 13, asyncio – Multithreading without...