To complement what other people are recommending here, I'd say that in cases like this I only sometimes read the documentation. Other times I put a line in my c

To complement what other people are recommending here, I'd say that in cases like this I only sometimes read the documentation. Other times I put a line in my code: import pdb; pdb.set_trace() which makes it enter the debugger at that point, and I simply inspect the object that I'm really getting, looking at what it supports, the documentation on its methods, etc. Doing it this way is not always feasible, since sometimes there's a prohibitive amount of setup code that needs running before you can get a real object. For short code paths though, like Django apps, it works really well.