Preface
The idea of this book came to me from the nice people at Packt Publishing. They wanted someone who could delve into the intricacies of high performance in Python and everything related to this subject, be it profiling, the available tools (such as profilers and other performance enhancement techniques), or even alternatives to the standard Python implementation.
Having said that, I welcome you to Mastering Python High Performance. In this book, we'll cover everything related to performance improvements. Knowledge about the subject is not strictly required (although it won't hurt), but knowledge of the Python programming language is required, especially in some of the Python-specific chapters.
We'll start by going through the basics of what profiling is, how it fits into the development cycle, and the benefits related to including this practice in it. Afterwards, we'll move on to the core tools required to get the job done (profilers and visual profilers). Then, we will take a look at a set of optimization techniques and finally arrive at a fully practical chapter that will provide a real-life optimization example.
