Some Easily Overlooked But Useful Python Features

For the past eight months, I’ve been locked away in my office working on a new edition of the Python Cookbook (O’Reilly & Associates). One of the benefits of writing a book is that you’re forced to go look at a lot of stuff, including topics that you think you already know. For me, the Cookbook was certainly no exception. Even though I’ve been using Python for a long time, I encountered a lot of new tricks that I had never seen before. Some of these were obviously brand new things just released, but many were features I had just never noticed even though they’ve been available in Python for many years.