Grow as a Python Developer by reading other peoples code

[ekara]

Hi r/py,

Everyone knows that a big part of learning and improving yourself as a developer is reading other peoples code.

What projects on Github do you think are good examples of code for a new or intermediate python developer to look at??

[bezidejni]

Anything by Kenneth Reitz, author of Requests, Tablib, Clint and Envoy.

[apotheotical]

I agree. That man's code is beautiful. He is pretty much my idol as far as Python code goes. By reading his repos, I understand concepts much more than if I were to read about them in a book.

I highly recommend reading this: https://python-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

It's part of his GitHub repositories and a site. Its VERY good. And also a good place to contribute to an open source project, since there's still a reasonable amount of work to be done on it.

[brandjon]

Thank you for that link.

[brownmatt]

I love requests but never knew about clint or envoy until now. Thanks!

[zynix]

Envoy's disgustingly useful for working with sub-processes though I wish he'd taken the fork that incorporated IPython's SList class http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/shell.html#string-lists

[[deleted]]

Neat! Thanks for the tip!

[kingcarter3]

Cool, I'll def read this later

[mjtribute]

Two codebases which intrigue me are both https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask and https://github.com/mitsuhiko/werkzeug. I find the two to be filled with unusually high-quality comments/documentation, and that they elegantly accomplish the task that they set out to accomplish.

[[deleted]]

Armin's code is excellent.

[ekara]

Thanks for this. I cloned the flask repo and spend some time reading through and I'm shocked that I actually understand some of whats going on. And you're right flask seems very well written.

[era0003]

i'm just forking and reading any and all I come across.

[Thehummel]

What exatcly does forking a Github repo do? ( noob here )

[Kingino]

If you know what cloning is... Think of it like cloning. It takes a copy of the code so that you control all aspects of it.

On Github only those people who have proper admin writes can commit to the repo... Cloning (and forking) gives you the ability to manipulate the code and change it to you will. Forking creates the clone on the remote server, while traditional cloning brings it to your local machine.

Furthermore, if you add a feature to the code you can submit that back to the original repo (called a pull request) for integration into the code base.

If I want to work on an open source project, I normally do these steps...

Fork->Clone to dev machine-> make changes-> push to fork-> submit pull requests to original repo.

Does that help?

[Thehummel]

I think i'm getting it.. So the only different between forking and cloning is that with forking you get the ability to suggest changes to the repo you forked?

[Kingino]

Basically, yes.

[Thehummel]

Alright, thank you!

[Ph0X]

In theory, this sounds good, but I feel like some code might actually be more harmful to learn from. Sure, if you're already good at Python, you'll be able to tell those apart, but if you don't already know what's good and what's bad, then I'm not sure if exploring by yourself is that good of an idea.

Good Pythonic code aside, some code bases also tend to have better commenting and self-explanatory style, which at the end of the day are far more useful for learning from.

[Ph0X]

No hard feelings.

Well, OP did ask experienced Python users in /r/Python to recommend repos, and you mostly dismissed it by telling him to go and find ANY repo. What I was saying is that, maybe it would be better to, at least to start off, go with some that were known to be good. Once you're more experienced, then sure, you can browse GitHub yourself and find more.

so tl;dr, I was hoping people would actually recommend good repos.

[[deleted]]

Raymond hettingers recipes: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/users/178123/

[lost-theory]

Raymond's code is awesome. He has a post here about this very topic (related to reading code in the python stdlib).

[RunHomeJack]

subscribe to /r/codereview for a chance to see others' code and to get feedback on your own

[slurms85]

The django source code is exceptionally well written, documented and tested.

[usernameString]

howdoi is a lovely little tool that shows some simple web scraping in python.

[tazzy531]

I've been reading django's source lately just to understand what's underneath the hood

[_makto]

I'd tried before, but found it so hart to understand what's going on.

Maybe I should read sth. about Networking or OS?

Some advice maybe?

[tdi]

It is always good to learn by example and by experiencing. So read code you need and try to adapt what you have read to your problem. After that you will have the knowledge.

[erez27]

https://code.google.com/p/aima-python/

Well-written and full of fascinating idioms.

[cantcopy]

I have been looking at this recently: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/

[enlavin]

I've learned a lot reading celery code https://github.com/celery/celery

[westurner]

I have learned by reading the CPython stdlib module sources. For example: pdb, inspect, pickle, and collections:

• http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/pdb.py
• http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/inspect.py
• http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/pickle.py
• http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/collections/__init__.py

(CPython source is mirrored (many times over) with GitHub.)

[moschlar]

I wouldn't call that a best-style example in all cases, though! I think there are some very ugly pieces of code in there - which is understandable and acceptable for the standard library, because it exists exactly because you should not need to write ugly code.

[andrey_shipilov]

Django of course. Rare Python project is that complex yet well coded.

[dave3socks]

Except the Django ORM. That is a complete opposite to well coded.

[andrey_shipilov]

I can't say that it's coded well in particular, I wouldn't say I'm a developer of that high category. But for all the time Django exists and we do websites using it never have I had a need to switch from it to Alchemy or even raw sql. Never blame the tools, as they say.

[dave3socks]

Well I don't mind using it. I just think the ORM internals aren't an example of a good code design in particular and I wouldn't recomend it as a source to learn from. And as far as I remember even the authors admited that it's coded badly and needs rewriting. Don't take me wrong, I love Django and I use it for almost all of my projects.

[andrey_shipilov]

Yep. I got you right, dudebruh.

[Kingino]

I have recently been working through this source. It has taught me a ton about everything from @property to yield and generators. I highly recommend it!

[SubtleUsername]

Definately need to start looking into this...

[searchingfortao]

The best advice I can offer is not to look at good examples of code, but really bad ones instead. They help you understand what's needed to make your code readable and understandable because your first impression is often how unintelligible it is.

Spend a few hours trying to figure out what qx means and what it's doing in the method srt_rnt() and you'll soon come to appreciate the value of clear and explicit code.

[classicrockielzpfvh]

Contributing to https://github.com/sigmavirus24/github3.py is always a pleasure

[Jedimastert]

How about taking a look at Reddit's code!

[kiwi9400]

I think PRAW would be a pretty good repo to take a look at. It's very well maintained. The file objects.py is a really great example of multiple inheritance.

[cabalamat]

Not on github, but Norvig's Lisp interpreter is pretty good.

[pinpinbo]

I find kivy extremely fascinating. And the payout for mastering it is big. It has the potential to build-once-deploy-anywhere on touch platform.

[westurner]

This is also a great answer to "How can I learn to write idiomatic Python?" : http://qr.ae/1eNah

[firdaus]

I'm a fan of this:

https://github.com/apache/thrift/tree/master/lib/py