Python has some powerful features that allow you to introspect your code or the code of others. I created the following video tutorial to help you learn how that works. This tutorial is from the Python 101 Screencast Related Articles Python 101: Introspection
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The Python programming language has several built-in types that it supports. One of my favorites is the dictionary. A dictionary is a mapping object maps hashable values to arbitrary objects (source). Other languages call dictionaries “hash tables”. They are mutable objects that you can change whenever you want to, unlike tuples. A dictionary’s keys must
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Last week I was doing some Test Driven Development training and overheard someone mention another programming language that had a test runner that you could set up to watch your project directory and run your tests when the files changed. I thought that was a neat idea. I also thought I could easily write my
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This week we welcome Luke Plant as our PyDev of the Week. Luke is one of the core developers of Django, a very popular Python web framework. Luke writes a blog with many articles about Django. If you’d like to see some of Luke’s contributions, then you will want to wander over to his Github
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Last year I ran into a situation where I needed to know if a function had been called. Basically we were trying to prevent shutting down a Twisted event loop twice or starting two of them. Anyway, in my research I stumbled across a fun post on StackOverflow that showed a couple of ways to
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My second book, Python 201: Intermediate Python, was just released as an online course over at Educative. I also have Python 101 on there as well. Educative is a pretty new educational website. It’s kind of like Code Academy except that they usually charge for access to all their courses. Note: This is NOT a
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This week we welcome Dan Bader (@dbader_org) as our PyDev of the Week. Dan does a weekly Python Tricks newsletter / blog that’s a fun read. He has also authored a Python Tricks book. I always like checking out my interviewee’s Github page to see what they enjoy coding or writing about, so I encourage
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People who are new to the Python programming language can get a bit confused about the difference between “==” (equality) and Python’s keyword “is” (identity). I have even seen experienced programmers who will find the difference subtle enough that they will introduce logic errors in their code do to a misunderstanding between the two. In
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This week we welcome Victor Stinner as our PyDev of the Week! Victor is quite active in the Python community and is a core Python developer. You can see some of his contributions here. He is the author of eight accepted PEPs which you can also read about at the previous link. If you’re interested
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Python 3.5 added more support for Unpacking Generalizations in PEP 448. According to the PEP, it added extended usages of the * iterable unpacking operator and ** dictionary unpacking operators to allow unpacking in more positions, an arbitrary number of times, and in additional circumstances. What this means is that we can now make calls
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This week our PyDev of the Week is Petr Viktorin (@EnCuKou). Petr is the author of PEP 489 — Multi-phase extension module initialization and teaches Python for the local PyLadies in Czech Republic. You can some of what he’s up to via his Github page or on his website. Let’s take some time to get
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Python 3.6 added a new module called secrets that is designed “to provide an obvious way to reliably generate cryptographically strong pseudo-random values suitable for managing secrets, such as account authentication, tokens, and similar”. Python’s random module was never designed for cryptographic use but for modeling and simulation. Of course, you could always use the
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Python 3.6 added the ability to create Asynchronous Comprehensions and Asynchronous Generators. You can read about asynchronous comprehension in PEP 530 while the asynchronous generators are described in PEP 525. The documentation states that you can now create asynchronous list, set and dict comprehensions and generator expressions. Their example looks like this: result = [i
What’s New in Python: Asynchronous Comprehensions / Generators Read More »
This week we welcome Åukasz Langa (@llanga) as our PyDev of the Week! Åukasz is the author of PEP 443 — Single-dispatch generic functions. He also authors an interesting blog, although it’s not just a programming blog. You can see what Åukasz has been up to over on Github. Let’s take a few moments to
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I review books for the i-programmer website from time to time and they recently gave me a copy of Murach’s Python Programming by Michael Urban and Joel Murach. This book is long at almost 600 pages and it’s pretty expensive for the paperback. For those of you with short attention spans, I give you the
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