Python

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Official documentation

• Built-in Functions
• Format Specification Mini-Language - for string formatting
• Python's formal guidance on dunders as a reserved class of identifier
• Unpacking Argument Lists
• Guide to CPython's Parser

Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)

Here in no particular order are some PEPs I find to be interesting reading

• PEP 1 - PEP Purpose and Guidelines (i.e. "what the heck is a PEP?")
• PEP 0 - Index of all PEPs
• PEP 8 - Style Guide for Python Code
• PEP 257 - Docstring Conventions
• PEP 602 - Annual Release Cycle for Python
• PEP 636 - Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial
• PEP 517 - A build-system independent format for source trees - Information on the modern organization of Python packaging, namely the division of concerns between:
  • integration frontends ("a tool that...attempts...to satisfy [a set of package requirements]")
  • build frontends ("a tool that...builds wheels from [source trees/distributions]")
  • build backends (the thing that actually does the building, at the request of the build frontend
• PEP 518 - Specifying Minimum Build System Requirements for Python Projects - i.e. _"what the heck is pyproject.toml?"_
• PEP 513 - A Platform Tag for Portable Linux Built Distributions - i.e. the manylinux1 platform target (see PEP 600 for the modern tagging system)

Talks

• Machete-mode Debugging - Ned Batchelder, PyCon 2016
• Raymond Hettinger "The Mental Game of Python", PyBay2019
• Beyond PEP8 - Raymond Hettinger talking about foolish consistency
• Pandas from the Ground up - PyCon 2015

Explanations

• Why you shouldn't invoke setup.py directly
• Python Virtual Environments in Five Minutes
• Python Names and Values - a discussion of how name resolution works in Python (e.g. why Python doesn't have "variables")
• Pragmatic Unicode - a crash-course introduction to text encoding, Unicode, and some of the Python pitfalls
• Weird Python Integers
• Python's calling model is "Call By Object"
• Understanding Python Decorators in 12 Easy Steps!
• Memory Management in Python - an overview of memory management in CPython
• Memory use in CPython and MicroPython - a comparison of memory management in CPython and MicroPython, based on Kavya Joshi's PyCon 2017 talk

Interesting libraries

• friendly: replacing standard traceback by something easier to understand
• tenacity: general-purpose retrying library

SciPy stack

• Python visualization landscape
• SciPy lectures
• Numpy ndarray structure under the hood
• Numpy: Array Indexing
• Numpy: Broadcasting
  • see also the older "Eric's broadcasting doc"
• MATLAB to Numpy cheatsheet

Misc.

• Packaging tools comparisons (note: slightly out of date in Jan 2024, but still a nice set of tables)
• manylinux timeline - visualizations of supported manylinux standards/glibc versions in PyPI packages over time
• "Get Your Mac Python From Python.org" - An excellent summary of the various ways to get a Python installation. Written with MacOS in mind, but much of what it says generalizes to other platforms.
• Ned Batchelder's sample package
• The Python Control Flow Graph - Article showing how to build a tool to visualize the CFG of a Python program
• Mailing list discussion of adding a TOML parser to the standard library - tl;dr it's still a mess, toml isn't maintained enough, tomlkit does too much. tomli seems to be the leading favorite.
• Why you should use python -m pip
• Under the hood of calling C/C++ from Python
• Python's Memory Allocator - some notes on arena allocation in CPython
• Your Guide to the CPython Source Code
• "How python implements super long integers?" - an excellent article about how CPython implements arbitrarily large integers.
• Common Python Gotchas
• Think Python
• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
• Python's Hidden Regular Expression Gems (particularly nice because of the Scanner class therein)
• Animating Regular Expressions With Python and Graphviz
• A Brief Look at Cpython String