The only 'trick' I know that really wowed me when I learned it is enumerate. It allows you to have access to the indexes of the elements within a for loop.
>>> l = ['a','b','c','d','e','f']
>>> for (index,value) in enumerate(l):
... print index, value
...
0 a
1 b
2 c
3 d
4 e
5 f
