Ask HN: Really great Python code | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Really great Python code

10 pointsjobeirne8 comments

So I've got an intermediate fluency with Python, but it's time for me to start writing some serious software and I'd like to get a feel for how things are Actually Done in Python.

Sifting through books is fun and all, but it seems to me that the most expedient route to cutting my teeth would be to dive into an existing code-base.

Is there a well written, publicly accessible Python project somewhere that can be perused to the end of getting an advanced feel for the language?

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The Python standard has some pure Python modules may be worth looking at. Doug Hellmann's Python Module of the Week, http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/contents.html, is good place to start.

I'd recommend looking at code that interests you. It will make reading the code more interesting and perhaps more useful. Here are some popular projects arrange by interest:

  Web framework: Django, Pylons
  TCP/IP networking: the official Bittorrent client, Mercurial, Tornado
  Database: SQLAlchemy, SQLObject

Past HN submissions are generally a good place to find interesting projects too: http://searchyc.com/submissions/python?sort=by_points

* How to Write a Spelling Corrector http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

* Case Study: Metaclass Hacking in fetchmailconf http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch09s01.html

All of Peter Norvig's Python code is fun to read.

django is a very tidy and pythonic code base. Ditto for twisted, but twisted might be more complicated than what you're trying to do (edit: or not). The recent Tornado server is of a an approachable size and from the look of it, very well engineered.

Doesn't Twisted have a lot of crusty, poorly-documented parts? I remember seeing a lot of old-style classes in Twisted Words.

There's tons of Python examples on Toby Segaran's blog: http://blog.kiwitobes.com

I know you've read some Python books, but you might want to check out Segaran's books too. The examples in Programming Collective Intelligence [http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321] are all Python too I think..

"The examples in Programming Collective Intelligence are all Python too I think.."

The code in PCI was terrible, very unpythonic code the last time I looked at it.Not "really great" , which is what OP asked for.

Maybe someone has done a rewrite, but otherwise I'd be very careful using the PCI code as an exemplar.

I have gleaned many good ideas from the python libraries that are shipped with the standard CPython distribution. I found the implementation of the various TCP, HTTP, etc server classes very interesting. Learnt quite a bit by reading the Tkinter support stuff.

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