59 Specific Ways to Write Better Python Brett Slatkin , Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Google
Audience: Advanced programmers who want to be more effective in Python (i.e., being more Pythonic)
Examples use Python 3 by default
1. Know Which Version of Python You're Using 2. Follow the PEP 8 Style Guide 3. Know the Differences Between bytes, str, and unicode 4. Write Helper Functions Instead of Complex Expressions 5. Know How to Slice Sequences 6. Avoid Using start, end, and stride in a Single Slice 7. Use List Comprehensions Instead of map and filter 8. Avoid More Than Two Expressions in List Comprehensions 9. Consider Generator Expressions for Large Comprehensions 10. Prefer enumerate Over range 11. Use zip to Process Iterators in Parallel 12. Avoid else Blocks After for and while Loops 13. Take Advantage of Each Block try/except/else/finally 14. Prefer Exceptions to Returning None 15. Know How Closures Interact with Variable Scope 16. Consider Generators Instead of Returning Lists 17. Be Defensive When Iterating Over Arguments 18. Reduce Visual Noise with Variable Positional Arguments 19. Provide Optional Behavior with Keyword Arguments 20. Use None and Docstrings to Specify Dynamic Default Arguments 21. Enforce Clarity with Keyword-Only Arguments 3. Classes and Inheritance 22. Prefer Helper Classes Over Bookkeeping with Dictionaries and Tuples 23. Accept Functions for Simple Interfaces Instead of Classes 24. Use @classmethod Polymorphism to Construct Objects Generically 25. Initialize Parent Classes with super 26. Use Multiple Inheritance Only for Mix-in Utility Classes 27. Prefer Public Attributes Over Private Ones 28. Inherit from collections.abc for Custom Container Types 4. Metaclasses and Attributes 29. Use Plain Attributes Instead of Get and Set Methods 30. Consider @property Instead of Refactoring Attributes 31. Use Descriptors for Reusable @property Methods 32. Use __getattr__, __getattribute__, and __setattr__ for Lazy Attributes 33. Validate Subclasses with Metaclasses 34. Register Class Existence with Metaclasses 35. Annotate Class Attributes with Metaclasses 5. Concurrency and Parallelism 36. Use subprocess to Manage Child Processes 37. Use Threads for Blocking I/O, Avoid for Parallelism 38. Use Lock to Prevent Data Races in Threads 39. Use Queue to Coordinate Work Between Threads 40. Consider Coroutines to Run Many Functions Concurrently 41. Consider concurrent.futures for True Parallelism 42. Define Function Decorators with functools.wraps 43. Consider contextlib and with Statements for Reusable try/finally Behavior 44. Make pickle Reliable with copyreg 45. Use datetime Instead of time for Local Clocks 46. Use Built-in Algorithms and Data Structures 47. Use decimal When Precision Is Paramount
48. Know Where to Find Community-Built Modules
49. Write Docstrings for Every Function, Class, and Module 50. Use Packages to Organize Modules and Provide Stable APIs 51. Define a Root Exception to Insulate Callers from APIs 52. Know How to Break Circular Dependencies 53. Use Virtual Environments for Isolated and Reproducible Dependencies 54. Consider Module-Scoped Code to Configure Deployment Environments 55. Use repr String for Debugging Output 56. Test Everything with unittest 57. Consider Interactive Debugging with pdb 58. Profile Before Optimizing 59. Use tracemalloc to Understand Memory Usage and Leaks