Elliot Forbes - Learning Concurrency in Python

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: August 2017

Production reference: 1140817

ISBN 978-1-78728-537-8

www.packtpub.com

Elliot Forbes has worked as a full-time software engineer at JPMorgan Chase for the last 2 years. He graduated from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland in the spring of 2015 and worked as a freelancer developing web solutions while studying there.

He has worked on numerous different technologies such as GoLang and NodeJS and plain old Java, and he has spent years working on concurrent enterprise systems. It is with this experience that he was able to write this book.

Elliot has even worked at Barclays Investment Bank for a summer internship in London and has maintained a couple of software development websites for the last 3 years.

Nikolaus Gradwohl was born 1976 in Vienna, Austria and always wanted to become an inventor like Gyro Gearloose. When he got his first Atari, he figured out that being a computer programmer is the closest he could get to that dream. For a living, he wrote programs for nearly anything that can be programmed, ranging from an 8-bit microcontroller to mainframes. In his free time, he likes to master on programming languages and operating systems.

Nikolaus authored the Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot book, and you can see some of his work on his blog at http://www.local-guru.net/.

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Python is a very high-level, general-purpose language that features a large number of powerful high-level and low-level libraries and frameworks that complement its delightful syntax. This easy-to-follow guide teaches you new practices and techniques to optimize your code and then moves on to more advanced ways to effectively write efficient Python code. Small and simple practical examples will help you test the concepts introduced, and you will be able to easily adapt them to any application.

Throughout this book, you will learn to build highly efficient, robust, and concurrent applications. You will work through practical examples that will help you address the challenges of writing concurrent code, and also you will learn to improve the overall speed of execution in multiprocessor and multicore systems and keep them highly available.

, Speed It Up!, helps you get to grips with threads and processes, and you'll also learn about some of the limitations and challenges of Python when it comes to implementing your own concurrent applications.

, Parallelize It, covers a multitude of topics including the differences between concurrency and parallelism. We will look at how they both leverage the CPU in different ways, and we also branch off into the topic of computer system design and how it relates to concurrent and parallel programming.

, Life of a Thread, delves deeply into the workings of Python's native threading library. We'll look at the numerous different thread types. We'll also look in detail at various concepts such as the multithreading model and the numerous ways in which we can make user threads to their lower-level siblings, the kernel threads.

, Synchronization between Threads, covers the various key issues that can impact our concurrent Python applications. We will delve into the topic of deadlocks and the famous "dining philosophers" problem and see how this can impact our own software.

, Communication between Threads, discusses quite a number of different mechanisms that we can employ to implement communication in our multithreaded systems. We delve into the thread-safe queue primitives that Python features natively.