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Practical Programming, 2nd Edition
book

Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

by Paul Gries, Jennifer Campbell, Jason Montojo
September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
350 pages
9h 38m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Timing the Functions

Profiling a program means measuring how long it takes to run and how much memory it uses. These two measures—time and space—are fundamental to the theoretical study of algorithms. They are also pretty important from a pragmatic point of view. Fast programs are more useful than slow ones, and programs that need more memory than what your computer has aren’t particularly useful at all.

This section introduces one way to time how long code takes to run. You’ll see how to run the three functions we developed to find the two lowest values in a list on 1,400 monthly readings of air pressure in Darwin, Australia, from 1882 to 1998.[6]

Module time contains functions related to time. One of these functions is perf_counter, which ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781941222485Errata Page