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Scientific Computing with Python

You're reading from   Scientific Computing with Python High-performance scientific computing with NumPy, SciPy, and pandas

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838822323
Length 392 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
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Authors (4):
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Olivier Verdier Olivier Verdier
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Olivier Verdier
Jan Erik Solem Jan Erik Solem
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Jan Erik Solem
Claus Führer Claus Führer
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Claus Führer
Claus Fuhrer Claus Fuhrer
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Claus Fuhrer
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Table of Contents (23) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started 2. Variables and Basic Types FREE CHAPTER 3. Container Types 4. Linear Algebra - Arrays 5. Advanced Array Concepts 6. Plotting 7. Functions 8. Classes 9. Iterating 10. Series and Dataframes - Working with Pandas 11. Communication by a Graphical User Interface 12. Error and Exception Handling 13. Namespaces, Scopes, and Modules 14. Input and Output 15. Testing 16. Symbolic Computations - SymPy 17. Interacting with the Operating System 18. Python for Parallel Computing 19. Comprehensive Examples 20. About Packt 21. Other Books You May Enjoy 22. References

5.4 Performance and vectorization

When it comes to the performance of your Python code, it often boils down to the difference between interpreted code and compiled code. Python is an interpreted programming language and basic Python code is executed directly without any intermediate compilation to machine code. With a compiled language, the code needs to be translated to machine instructions before execution.

The benefits of an interpreted language are many but interpreted code cannot compete with compiled code for speed. To make your code faster, you can write some parts in a compiled language such as FORTRAN, C, or C++. This is what NumPy and SciPy do.

For this reason, it is best to use functions in NumPy and SciPy over interpreted versions whenever possible. NumPy array operations such as matrix multiplication, matrix-vector multiplication, matrix factorization, scalar products, and so on are much faster than any pure Python equivalent. Consider the...

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