Nice tips. One nitpick: the "inline if statement" is handy because it works as an expression, not just as a statement. A few more useful things: frozenset: im

Nice tips. One nitpick: the "inline if statement" is handy because it works as an expression, not just as a statement. A few more useful things: frozenset: immutable set values. these can be hashed, so you can use them as keys in dicts or put them in sets. poor-man's transpose via zip: >>> x = [('a', 'b'), ('c', 'd')] >>> zip(*x) [('a', 'c'), ('b', 'd')] slices can be constructed with the "slice" function and passed around as values: >>> f = lambda x, s : x[s] >>> first3 = slice(3) >>> last3 = slice(-3, None) >>> rev = slice(None, None, -1) >>> f('hello', first3) 'hel' >>> f('hello', last3) 'llo' >>> f('hello', rev) 'olleh'