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This is a nice list of "things you might not know" that is worth skimming to add to your toolkit. If you are really interested in "advanced Python", though, I

This is a nice list of "things you might not know" that is worth skimming to add to your toolkit. If you are really interested in "advanced Python", though, I would recommend the book Fluent Python by Ramalho. I have the first edition which is still highly relevant, including the async bits (you just have to translate the coroutines into async syntax). There is a second edition which is more up to date. I would also recommend checking out the functools[0] and itertools[1] modules in the standard library. Just go and read the docs on them top to bottom. It's also worth reading the first few sections of Python Data Model[2] and then bookmarking this page. [0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html [1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html [2] https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html

sgarland 2y ago
+1 to itertools especially. Absurdly powerful, and the recipes at the bottom of the doc page are terrific. The only problem I’ve found is that for interviews, people often aren’t familiar with it, which can lead to you solving whatever puzzle they had in far less time than they intended, and without manually building whatever logic it was they assumed you would need.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  > The only problem I’ve found is that for interviews, people often aren’t familiar with it, which can lead to you solving whatever puzzle they had in far less time than they intended, and without manually building whatever logic it was they assumed you would need. My favourite example of a similar thing happening to me was when I was asked to reverse the digits in a number. I somewhat jokingly asked if I was assuming base 10, which got some awkward looks so I knew something was up. They weren't impressed at all with my answer of `"".join(reversed(str(123456789)))`. I didn't get the job.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    >I didn't get the job. Their loss. Expecting an arithmetic solution to be necessary is incongruous with accepting the overhead of Python. IIRC your approach will actually be faster; the string conversion implicitly number-crunches on the bare metal, whereas any arithmetic approach in Python code won't. Unless they wanted you to convert back to int afterwards. Or wanted you to reverse the string with the slicing trick (which is, indeed, quite a bit faster yet).

sgarland 2y ago

+1 to itertools especially. Absurdly powerful, and the recipes at the bottom of the doc page are terrific. The only problem I’ve found is that for interviews, people often aren’t familiar with it, which can lead to you solving whatever puzzle they had in far less time than they intended, and without manually building whatever logic it was they assumed you would need.

globular-toast 2y ago
> The only problem I’ve found is that for interviews, people often aren’t familiar with it, which can lead to you solving whatever puzzle they had in far less time than they intended, and without manually building whatever logic it was they assumed you would need. My favourite example of a similar thing happening to me was when I was asked to reverse the digits in a number. I somewhat jokingly asked if I was assuming base 10, which got some awkward looks so I knew something was up. They weren't impressed at all with my answer of `"".join(reversed(str(123456789)))`. I didn't get the job.
- zahlman 2y ago
  >I didn't get the job. Their loss. Expecting an arithmetic solution to be necessary is incongruous with accepting the overhead of Python. IIRC your approach will actually be faster; the string conversion implicitly number-crunches on the bare metal, whereas any arithmetic approach in Python code won't. Unless they wanted you to convert back to int afterwards. Or wanted you to reverse the string with the slicing trick (which is, indeed, quite a bit faster yet).