Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Using PyDoc help


If you use docstrings appropriately, you can harness the power of PyDoc, which is a built-in Python toolset that can extract docstrings and other information and format them into easy-to-read text. While there are many other tools available, PyDoc comes with Python, so you can be sure of it being available (as long as you have access to the Python standard library).

How to do it...

  1. PyDoc is accessed by using the help() function, as seen previously. While built-in objects can have multiple pages of information, your code doesn't have to be as elaborate, unless you want it to be. Depending on the Python version being used, you don't have to import the module you want help on, but it is generally better to import it, just to make sure.

 

  1. Looking back at the preceding random() example, you can see that a lot of information is available via help(); of course, it is all dependent on how much information the developer decides to put into the docstrings. Functionally, the output is...