Book Image

Advanced Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Quan Nguyen
Book Image

Advanced Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Quan Nguyen

Overview of this book

Python's powerful capabilities for implementing robust and efficient programs make it one of the most sought-after programming languages. In this book, you'll explore the tools that allow you to improve performance and take your Python programs to the next level. This book starts by examining the built-in as well as external libraries that streamline tasks in the development cycle, such as benchmarking, profiling, and optimizing. You'll then get to grips with using specialized tools such as dedicated libraries and compilers to increase your performance at number-crunching tasks, including training machine learning models. The book covers concurrency, a major solution to making programs more efficient and scalable, and various concurrent programming techniques such as multithreading, multiprocessing, and asynchronous programming. You'll also understand the common problems that cause undesirable behavior in concurrent programs. Finally, you'll work with a wide range of design patterns, including creational, structural, and behavioral patterns that enable you to tackle complex design and architecture challenges, making your programs more robust and maintainable. By the end of the book, you'll be exposed to a wide range of advanced functionalities in Python and be equipped with the practical knowledge needed to apply them to your use cases.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
1
Section 1: Python-Native and Specialized Optimization
8
Section 2: Concurrency and Parallelism
18
Section 3: Design Patterns in Python

Locks as a solution to race conditions

Intuitively, since the race conditions that we observed arose when multiple threads or processes accessed and wrote to a shared resource simultaneously, the key idea behind solving race conditions is isolating the executions of different threads/processes, especially when interacting with a shared resource. Specifically, we need to make sure that a thread/process can only access the shared resource after any other threads/processes interacting with the resource have finished their interactions with that resource.

With locks, we can turn a shared resource inside a concurrent program into a critical section, whose integrity of data is guaranteed to be protected. We will see this in action next.

The effectiveness of locks

A critical section guarantees the mutual exclusion of a shared resource and cannot be accessed concurrently by multiple processes or threads; this will prevent any protected data from being updated or altered with conflicting...