Effective Python

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author

1. Pythonic Thinking
Item 1: Know Which Version of Python You’re Using
Item 2: Follow the PEP 8 Style Guide
Item 3: Know the Differences Between bytes, str, and unicode
Item 4: Write Helper Functions Instead of Complex Expressions
Item 5: Know How to Slice Sequences
Item 6: Avoid Using start, end, and stride in a Single Slice
Item 7: Use List Comprehensions Instead of map and filter
Item 8: Avoid More Than Two Expressions in List Comprehensions
Item 9: Consider Generator Expressions for Large Comprehensions
Item 10: Prefer enumerate Over rang
Item 11: Use zip to Process Iterators in Parallel
Item 12: Avoid else Blocks After for and while Loops
Item 13: Take Advantage of Each Block in try/except/else/finally

2. Functions
Item 14: Prefer Exceptions to Returning None
Item 15: Know How Closures Interact with Variable Scope
Item 16: Consider Generators Instead of Returning Lists
Item 17: Be Defensive When Iterating Over Arguments
Item 18: Reduce Visual Noise with Variable Positional Arguments
Item 19: Provide Optional Behavior with Keyword Arguments
Item 20: Use None and Docstrings to Specify Dynamic Default Arguments
Item 21: Enforce Clarity with Keyword-Only Arguments

3. Classes and Inheritance
Item 22: Prefer Helper Classes Over Bookkeeping with Dictionaries and Tuples
Item 23: Accept Functions for Simple Interfaces Instead of Classes
Item 24: Use @classmethod Polymorphism to Construct Objects Generically
Item 25: Initialize Parent Classes with super
Item 26: Use Multiple Inheritance Only for Mix-in Utility Classes
Item 27: Prefer Public Attributes Over Private Ones
Item 28: Inherit from collections.abc for Custom Container Types

4. Metaclasses and Attributes
Item 29: Use Plain Attributes Instead of Get and Set Methods
Item 30: Consider @property Instead of Refactoring Attributes
Item 31: Use Descriptors for Reusable @property Methods
Item 32: Use __getattr__, __getattribute__, and __setattr__ for Lazy Attributes
Item 33: Validate Subclasses with Metaclasses
Item 34: Register Class Existence with Metaclasses
Item 35: Annotate Class Attributes with Metaclasses

5. Concurrency and Parallelism
Item 36: Use subprocess to Manage Child Processes
Item 37: Use Threads for Blocking I/O, Avoid for Parallelism
Item 38: Use Lock to Prevent Data Races in Threads
Item 39: Use Queue to Coordinate Work Between Threads
Item 40: Consider Coroutines to Run Many Functions Concurrently
Item 41: Consider concurrent.futures for True Parallelism

6. Built-in Modules
Item 42: Define Function Decorators with functools.wraps
Item 43: Consider contextlib and with Statements for Reusable try/finally Behavior
Item 44: Make pickle Reliable with copyreg
Item 45: Use datetime Instead of time for Local Clocks
Item 46: Use Built-in Algorithms and Data Structures
Item 47: Use decimal When Precision Is Paramount
Item 48: Know Where to Find Community-Built Modules

7. Collaboration
Item 49: Write Docstrings for Every Function, Class, and Module
Item 50: Use Packages to Organize Modules and Provide Stable APIs
Item 51: Define a Root Exception to Insulate Callers from APIs
Item 52: Know How to Break Circular Dependencies
Item 53: Use Virtual Environments for Isolated and Reproducible Dependencies

8. Production
Item 54: Consider Module-Scoped Code to Configure Deployment Environments
Item 55: Use repr Strings for Debugging Output
Item 56: Test Everything with unittest
Item 57: Consider Interactive Debugging with pdb
Item 58: Profile Before Optimizing
Item 59: Use tracemalloc to Understand Memory Usage and Leaks

Index