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cpython internals

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I have been paid money to write Python code since about 2006, so I figured it was probably time that I should understand some of the inner workings of Python. I therefore picked up two books on the topic, this one being the first of the two.

This book to be honest isn’t completely what I expected. Its very well written and quite interesting, but its more about the things you’d need to know to become a Python core developer, rather than the things you should know as a user of Python like how the Python dictionary implementation is built.

(If you want that specifically, this video is an excellent introduction).

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CPython Internals Book Cover CPython Internals
Anthony Shaw
May 5, 2021
396

Get your guided tour through the Python 3.9 interpreter: Unlock the inner workings of the Python language, compile the Python interpreter from source code, and participate in the development of CPython. Are there certain parts of Python that just seem like magic? This book explains the concepts, ideas, and technicalities of the Python interpreter in an approachable and hands-on fashion. Once you see how Python works at the interpreter level, you can optimize your applications and fully leverage the power of Python.

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Shift

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This is the second book in the Silo series, following on the Wool, which I recently read. I think to a certain extend this book is better than the first one -- I certainly found it compelling. An excellent read that explains how the universe described in Wool came to be, but yet also sets the scene for the third book in the trilogy.

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Starter Villain

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Now, I might be biased because I like John Scalzi's stuff, but this book was really good. It starts slower than a normal Scalzi book, and takes a couple of chapters to really get going, but I am glad I was patient with it. Apart from that its a quick easy read. Its a typical Scalzi book, light hearted and fun. I think this one requires you suspend disbelief a little harder than others (except perhaps for Redshirts) but that doesn't make it less enjoyable.

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Wool

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Chet bought me this book and demanded I read it, and honestly that was a good call. The book reminds me a bit of  Oryx and Crake, but perhaps that's unfair given I read that one eight years ago and have probably forgotten some important details. The book is well paced and engaging. Despite being as long as many of Neil Stephenson's books, I felt it was a much more approachable read than that. I found the second half of the book a bit harder to read that the first half, because it doesn't pull many punches in terms of the consequences of people's actions and is pretty good at building suspense. There were definitely points where I had to pause because I was pretty sure something bad was going to happen to someone I'd grown fond of. That said, it was still a great read. I've gone and bought the next two in the series because I'm confident I'm going to want to read them now too.

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Understanding Compression

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I bought this book on a whim, because I was trying to understand a compression scheme and had trouble finding good documentation on it. The book overall is written in a quite conversational style that I find a bit distracting from the content, and the introduction is a bit repetitive -- yes I get it, there's some maths involved. Thanks. That said, the content is a solid and quite approchable introduction to the topic area. I haven't ever thought before about entropy in information theory for example, I now feel like I could give a coherent elevator description of the topic. Another example is the description of Huffman codes. Here the topic is introduced with four pages and a few diagrams and I "get it". In the random algorithms book on my shelf (Introduction to Algorithms, third edition by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein), the same content takes ten pages and includes a six page set of lemmas around the code's correctness. Both descriptions would get you there in the end, but Understanding Compression's description is definitely more approachable. Overall, its very rare for me to sit down and actually read a technical book from cover to cover, but this book…

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