A few tips for people interested in learning Python

Intro to Python for people who know Java.md

Python for Java programmers

Part of what makes python readable is the absence of type information, the indentation-based block structure for code, and a few Python idioms, also known as "syntax sugar" if you will.

This tutorial assumes the reader is familiar with other programming languages like Java and shows some examples of Python coolness.

The boolean constants are True and False. Strings are strings (can use both single or double quotes to denote), floats are floats, and ints (grow as needed).

s = 'le string'   # can also use "le string"
f = 1.2
i = 3

There is also a native complex number type, should a need arise.

Tuples and Lists

Python syntax sometimes uses tuple-syntax which is any expression separated by commas. Here is an assignment of 3 to i and 4 to j using tuple notation:

i, j = 3, 4

A tuple is a fixed-length immutable structure of things separated by commas. Tuples are denoted with brackets:

(i, j) = (3, 4)

Lists are denoted with square brackets [3,4] and can contain a mix of different objects mylist = ['le string', 3, 4].

We use 0-based-indexing and square brackets to access tuple and list elements, e.g. mylist[0] will return 'le string'.

Note: Python is forgiving about extra trailing commas in lists and tuples [3,4,]==[3,4] and (3,4,)==(3,4).

Dicts

The main workhorse in Python is the associative array, which is called a dictionary in Python.

d = {'key1':'value1',   'key2':'value2' }
d['key1']
# = 'value1'

Keys are usually ints or strings, but can in fact be anything that is "hashable".

List comprehension

nums = [1, 2, 3, 4]
nums_doubled = [ 2*x for x in nums ]      # == [2, 4, 6, 8]

Also useful in for loops:

for x in nums:
    print 2*x

To obtain a standard for-loop construction like in other programming languages, with an index i varying over a range of values you must use the range function:

for i in range(0,10):             # ==   for( int i=0; i<10; i++ )
    print i 

Dict comprehension

In order to iterate over all the contents of a dictionary, use the dictionary's items method:

for key, value in d.items():
    print key
    print value

Note, that dict objects are not ordered. Items will come out in the order of they hash value and may not correspond to the order in which they were inserted into the dict. If ordering is important consider using an OrderedDict which can be imported from collections.

Magic methods

Every python object has some important "magin methods", which by convention are denoted surrounded by double underscores. The most useful of these is the __dict__ method which forces the object to represent itself as a dictionary: the obects attributes, and methods become the keys, and the values are the values of the attributes or the output of repr.

For people used to "looking around" in objects as in JavaScript, the __dict__ method will prove to be invaluable.

Debugging example, say you're learning how to use a django generic ListView, and after some error pages you've got a template in place and now you need to figure out how what you can work with. The API says get_queryset cannot take any arguments, but what do we have on self? Know thyself they say:

class TaskList(ListView):
    template_name = 'task_list.html'
    def get_queryset(self):
        print self.__dict__   # looking around in completely unknown land...

Apparently taskclass = self.kwargs['taskclass'] which means we can find the task-specific queryset using taskclass.model.objects.all().