python - good places to check out example prog / code online?

Question

there is a year old, similar question - but in case there have been changes afoot:

i'm an intermediate c++ programmer just starting out on python, post some online tuts etc i can do some basic pythoneering, but was wondering if there are good places i can look online for simple(ish) --pref console based-- code that i can learn from, ideally with some sort of commentary.

anything come to mind?

thanks

Answer 1

The standard library is an excellent place to the start. It's maintained by the core python team and is of high quality with a lot of interesting idioms. I'd recommend the newer modules since they don't have much backward compatibility cruft and are more representative of the language as it is now. The older ones were written for earlier versions of Python and have some restrictions when it comes to API changes etc.

The list of modules in the standard library is described at http://docs.python.org/library/. You can go through it and decide which one you want to look at (area of interest etc.). Their sources are viewable at the mercurial repo here http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/d7e85ddb1336/Lib (as of today). These are for the mainline 2.6 release. You can also checkout the repo and browse it on your local machine.

You can also start up your interpreter, import a module (say os) and do a print os.__file__ to see where the source file is if you want to look at the code in your local editor.

Answer 2

ActiveState Recipes is a good source for all kinds of Python scripts. But if you want to learn the basics of Python, you might just want to look at the standard library that ships with Python ("lib" directory").

Answer 3

i came across This The other day, Probably you can learn some python basics and have a laugh too! Anyways, look at the libs as they said above, they are very useful

Answer 4

If you enjoy riddles: www.pythonchallenge.com

If you're an intermediate C++ programmer, you're already equipped to handle to programming concepts. I like it because it gives me a reason to learn each part of the language, without being mundane 'Hello World' tasks.

However, some of the riddles are pretty tough and/or unrelated to programming. Either way, doing the first few will probably be enough to get your confidence up with Python syntax.