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
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Bridging Python with C and C++

Python is great but it isn't suited for everything. Sometimes you may find that particular problems can be solved more easily with a different language. Those different languages may be better due to greater expressiveness for certain technical domains (like control engineering, image processing, or system programming) or offer natural performance gains over Python. And Python (together with default CPython implementation) has a few characteristics that aren't necessarily good for performance:

  • Threading usability is greatly reduced for CPU-bound tasks due to the existence of Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in CPython and is dependent on the Python implementation of choice
  • Python is not a compiled language (in the way C and Go are) so it lacks many compile-time optimizations
  • Python does not provide static typing and the possible optimizations that come with it

But the fact that some languages are better...