I’m super-happy to say that Micha and I have submitted the manuscript to O’Reilly for our High Performance Python book. Here’s the final chapter list:
- Understanding Performant Python
- Profiling to find bottlenecks (%timeit, cProfile, line_profiler, memory_profiler, heapy and more)
- Lists and Tuples (how they work under the hood)
- Dictionaries and Sets (under the hood again)
- Iterators and Generators (introducing intermediate-level Python techniques)
- Matrix and Vector Computation (numpy and scipy and Linux’s perf)
- Compiling to C (Cython, Shed Skin, Pythran, Numba, PyPy) and building C extensions
- Concurrency (getting past IO bottlenecks using Gevent, Tornado, AsyncIO)
- The multiprocessing module (pools, IPC and locking)
- Clusters and Job Queues (IPython, ParallelPython, NSQ)
- Using less RAM (ways to store text with far less RAM, probabilistic counting)
- Lessons from the field (stories from experienced developers on all these topics)
August is still the expected publication date, a soon-to-follow Early Release will have all the chapters included. Next up I’ll be teaching on some of this in August at EuroSciPy in Cambridge.
Some related (but not covered in the book) bit of High Performance Python news:
- PyPy.js is now faster than CPython (but not as fast as PyPy) – crazy and rather cutting effort to get Python code running on a javascript engine through the RPython PyPy toolchain
- Micropython runs in tiny memory environments, it aims to runs on embedded devices (e.g. ARM boards) with low RAM where CPython couldn’t possibly run, it is pretty advanced and lets us use Python code in a new class of environment
- cytools offers Cython compiled versions of the pytoolz extended iterator objects, running faster than pytoolz and via iterators probably using significantly less RAM than when using standard Python containers
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.