Book Image

Expert Python Programming – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By : Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé
5 (1)
Book Image

Expert Python Programming – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

5 (1)
By: Michał Jaworski, Tarek Ziadé

Overview of this book

This new edition of Expert Python Programming provides you with a thorough understanding of the process of building and maintaining Python apps. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, this fourth edition has been extensively updated. Throughout this book, you’ll get acquainted with the latest Python improvements, syntax elements, and interesting tools to boost your development efficiency. The initial few chapters will allow experienced programmers coming from different languages to transition to the Python ecosystem. You will explore common software design patterns and various programming methodologies, such as event-driven programming, concurrency, and metaprogramming. You will also go through complex code examples and try to solve meaningful problems by bridging Python with C and C++, writing extensions that benefit from the strengths of multiple languages. Finally, you will understand the complete lifetime of any application after it goes live, including packaging and testing automation. By the end of this book, you will have gained actionable Python programming insights that will help you effectively solve challenging problems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
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15
Index

Where are we now and where are we going?

Python isn't a young language. Its history starts somewhere in the late 1980s and the official 1.0 release happened in year 1994. We could discuss the whole timeline of major Python releases mentioned here, but we really only need to be concerned about a few dates:

  • October 16, 2000: official release of Python 2.0
  • December 3, 2008: official release of Python 3.0
  • November 9, 2011: announcement of Python 2.8 release un-schedule
  • January 1, 2020: official sunsetting of Python 2

So, at the time of writing, Python 3 is almost half as old as Python itself. It has also been active for longer than Python 2 was when it comes to active development of new language features.

Although Python 3 has been around for quite some time, its adoption was so slow that the initial end of life for Python 2 was postponed by 5 years. It was mostly due to a lot of backward compatibility issues that didn't always allow...