Python: Am I missing something? [closed]

Answer 1

You've gotten good suggestions so far. I'd only add Dive Into Python.

EDIT: As of Oct 4, 2011, this work can be found here. Dive Into Python 3, here. "Why" this is: see here, here and here.

Answer 2

Study well-designed pythonic APIs / frameworks. Some of the best live outside the standard library. Note what they allow you to not do. My favorites:

• py.test is more pythonic than unittest (which was based on JUnit). Just write test_foo() function instead of a class inheriting from unittest.TestCase. Just do assert x == y instead of self.assertEqual(x, y). Many more goodies...

  • Doctest is also more pythonic than unittest. Many give up on it due to some practical annoyances, but the idea is brilliant.

  • If you're deeply into testing, the mock module's action -> assertion approach is more Pythonic than competing libraries record -> replay paradigm.

• requests is one of the cleanest API's I've ever seen, way better than httplib + urllib + urllib2.

• JSON and YAML are more pythonic than XML.

  • JSON-RPC is more pythonic than XMLRPC or shudder SOAP.

  • ElementTree is much more pythonic API than DOM. By optimizing for tags having either .text or children it reduces the XML <-> data structures impedance mismatch (but can still round-trip mixed content via the .tail hack).

• Scapy is an astonishingly terse framework for sending and dissecting network packets.

• I believe Storm is the most pythonic Object-Relational Mapping out there. Disclaimer: I have nearly no experience with ORMs.

• heapq is a beautifully implemented module. Just read the code.

• itertools is very powerful. Read all the examples in the documentation.
  Opinions vary on whether using it extensively is pythonic or a weird dialect :-)

Read "what's new in Python", at least for the last version you're using. Read some PEPs. Understand why the changes are an improvement.

Finally, make sure you make the most of interactive Python. The best way to learn APIs is to try them out and see what happens! Multi-line editing, completion and easy help() access are must-have features - check out ipython (including the notebook!), dreampie, bpython.

Answer 3

import this

If you can put your code next to the Zen of Python and feel good about it you are half way there. Also check the this.py module: a little bit of irony.

The other half is learning about stuff like: regular expressions, list comprehensions, generators, meta-classes, argument unpacking, decorators, list stepping, 'with' statement, conditional assignment, powerful built-ins like enumerate(), map(), zip(), reduce(), any() and pow(), and many others(check Hidden features of Python for more)

Along the way you can read other people's code and modify it.

Finnaly: Learn about finally and import antigravity

Answer 4

I would suggest finding a personal python guru. Show them some of your code and have them review/rewrite it into idiomatic python. Thus will you be enlightened.