Expert Python Programming

Attain a deep understanding of building, maintaining, packaging, and shipping robust Python applications

Key Features

• Discover the new features of Python, such as dictionary merge, the zoneinfo module, and structural pattern matching
• Create manageable code to run in various environments with different sets of dependencies
• Implement effective Python data structures and algorithms to write, test, and optimize code

Book Description

Python is used in a wide range of domains owing to its simple yet powerful nature. Although writing Python code is easy, making it readable, reusable, and easy to maintain can be challenging. Complete with best practices, useful tools, and standards implemented by professional Python developers, this fourth edition will help you in not only overcoming such challenges but also learning Python’s latest features and advanced concepts.

The book begins with a warm-up, where you will catch-up with the latest Python improvements, syntax elements, and interesting tools to boost your development efficiency. Further, the initial few chapters should allow experienced programmers coming from different languages to safely land in the Python ecosystem.

As you progress, 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.

By the end of the book, you should be proficient in writing efficient and maintainable Python code.

What you will learn

• Explore modern ways of setting up repeatable and consistent Python development environments
• Effectively package Python code for community and production use
• Learn about modern syntax elements of Python programming, such as f-strings, dataclasses, enums, and lambda functions
• Demystify metaprogramming in Python with metaclasses
• Write concurrent code in Python
• Monitor and optimize the performance of Python application
• Extend and integrate Python with code written in different languages

Who this book is for

The Python programming book is intended for expert programmers who want to learn Python’s advanced-level concepts and latest features.

Anyone who has basic Python skills should be able to follow the content of the book, although it might require some additional effort from less experienced programmers. It should also be a good introduction to Python 3.9 for those who are still a bit behind and continue to use other older versions.

Table of Contents

1. Section 1: Knowing your tools - Current Status of Python
2. Modern Python Development Environments
3. New Things in Python
4. Python in Comparison with Other Languages
5. Section 2: Building applications with Python - Interfaces, Patterns and Modularity
6. Concurrency
7. Event-Driven Programming
8. Elements of Metaprogramming
9. Bridging Python with C and C++
10. Section 3: Maintaining Python Applications - Testing and Quality Automation
11. Packaging and Distributing Python Code
12. Observing Application Behavior and Performance
13. Code Optimization

Michał Jaworski has more than 10 years of professional experience in writing software using various programming languages. He has written several high-performance and distributed backend services for web applications. He has been serving various roles at multiple companies, from an ordinary software engineer to lead software architect. His beloved language of choice has always been Python.

Tarek Ziadé is a Software Engineer, located in Burgundy, France. He works at Elastic, building tools for developers. Before Elastic, he worked at Mozilla for 10 years, and he founded a French Python User group called Afpy. Tarek has written several articles on the Python language for various magazines, and also a few books in French and English.