Which PEP's are must reads?
Question:
I’m a fairly strong Python coder, but too much of my style is a little haphazard, and I’m sure there are more Pythonic solutions to many problems than the ones I come up with. Which PEPs are essential for any well versed Pythonista to read?
Answers:
Definitely PEP 8, a Style Guide for Python.
I found that reading the declined ones can give some good insights into what’s Pythonic and what isn’t.
This was a while ago so I don’t have any specific examples.
It is now retrospective, but still interesting: I think Things that will Not Change in Python 3000 is a good read, with lots of links to the discussions that preceded the decisions.
Also pep 0257 docstring convention
Although Python is incredibly intuitive, a lot of people do not comprehend his philosophy.
Pep 20: The Zen of Python
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Flat is better than nested.
- Sparse is better than dense.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
- Although practicality beats purity.
- Errors should never pass silently.
- Unless explicitly silenced.
- In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
- There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do
it.
- Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
- Now is better than never.
- Although never is often better than right now.
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
- If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
- Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!
I’d also recommend PEPs 8 and 257. I know this deviates slightly from the original question, but I’d like to point out that PyCharm (probably the best Python IDE around in my opinion) automatically checks if you’re following some of the most important PEP 8 guidelines, just in case anyone’s interested…
Here is a index of PEP – http://www.python.org/dev/peps/
when ever one has doubt about a topic, they can search in that
I’m a fairly strong Python coder, but too much of my style is a little haphazard, and I’m sure there are more Pythonic solutions to many problems than the ones I come up with. Which PEPs are essential for any well versed Pythonista to read?
Definitely PEP 8, a Style Guide for Python.
I found that reading the declined ones can give some good insights into what’s Pythonic and what isn’t.
This was a while ago so I don’t have any specific examples.
It is now retrospective, but still interesting: I think Things that will Not Change in Python 3000 is a good read, with lots of links to the discussions that preceded the decisions.
Also pep 0257 docstring convention
Although Python is incredibly intuitive, a lot of people do not comprehend his philosophy.
Pep 20: The Zen of Python
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Flat is better than nested.
- Sparse is better than dense.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
- Although practicality beats purity.
- Errors should never pass silently.
- Unless explicitly silenced.
- In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
- There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do
it.- Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
- Now is better than never.
- Although never is often better than right now.
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
- If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
- Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!
I’d also recommend PEPs 8 and 257. I know this deviates slightly from the original question, but I’d like to point out that PyCharm (probably the best Python IDE around in my opinion) automatically checks if you’re following some of the most important PEP 8 guidelines, just in case anyone’s interested…
Here is a index of PEP – http://www.python.org/dev/peps/
when ever one has doubt about a topic, they can search in that