Home Original page

Anything like "Effective Java" for Python?

Steve Howell showell30 at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 11 10:16:25 EST 2010 
On Mar 11, 7:05 am, kj <no.em... at please.post> wrote:
> In <mailman.561.1268239578.23598.python-l... at python.org> Chris Withers <ch... at simplistix.co.uk> writes:
>
> >kj wrote:
>
> >> Subject line pretty much says it all: is there a book like "Effective
> >> Java"
> >oxymoronic, no?
> >Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
>
> I hear you, but still: read "Effective Java" some day; it will make
> you a better programmer, whatever your language preference.  I'm
> certainly no fan of Java, but I still rank Effective Java as one
> of my best reads on programming ever.  I felt that my maturity as
> a programmer went up a notch or two after digesting this book.
>

I'll second that.  I much prefer Python to Java, but Effective Java is
an excellent book.

Many of its topics would be applicable to Python, although the
solutions in Python would obviously be different.

  Eliminate obsolete object references (use None to break reference
counts)
  Avoid finalizers (use the "with" statement)
  Favor immutability
  Design method signatures carefully (including the x=[] gotcha)
  Optimize judiciously
  Don't ignore exceptions
  Avoid excessive synchronization

There are also some topics in Effective Java where the advice is
almost the opposite of Python tradition.
More information about the Python-list mailing list