Friday 12 January 2018

book review: Effective Python

Brent Slatkin.
Effective Python: 59 specific ways to write better Python.
Pearson. 2015

This excellent little book will make you a better Python programmer in many ways. It comprises 59 different recipes of how to use Python more effectively. These range from programming in the small – such as using slicing, list comprehensions, generators, enumerate, zip – to progressively larger issues – such as exceptions, keyword arguments, custom containers – then on to trickier concepts – such as metaclasses, threads, coroutines, built-in modules – to programming in the large – such as reliable pickling, docstrings, packages, unit testing, profiling, and finding memory leaks.

Each one of the recipes explains the issue, discusses one or more solutions, with examples and discussion of tradeoffs, and concludes with a short list of the things to remember. The discussion of various tradeoffs gives great insight into the underlying issues, and the examples are well chosen and very useful.

Even if you follow only a few of the recipes, you will find they make your Python coding more effective. If you follow all 59, your code should fairly fly! Highly recommended.



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