Python Documentation Sources

By this point in the book, you’re probably starting to realize that Python comes with an amazing amount of prebuilt functionality—built-in functions and exceptions, predefined object attributes and methods, standard library modules, and more. And we’ve really only scratched the surface of each of these categories.

One of the first questions that bewildered beginners often ask is: how do I find information on all the built-in tools? This section provides hints on the various documentation sources available in Python. It also presents documentation strings (docstrings) and the PyDoc system that makes use of them. These topics are somewhat peripheral to the core language itself, but they become essential knowledge as soon as your code reaches the level of the examples and exercises in this part of the book.

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As summarized in Table 15-1, there are a variety of places to look for information on Python, with generally increasing verbosity. Because documentation is such a crucial tool in practical programming, we’ll explore each of these categories in the sections that follow.

Table 15-1. Python documentation sources

Form

Role

# comments

In-file documentation

The dir function

Lists of attributes available in objects

Docstrings: __doc__

In-file documentation attached to objects

PyDoc: The help function

Interactive help for objects

PyDoc: HTML reports

Module documentation in a browser

The standard manual set

Official language and library descriptions

Web resources

Online tutorials, examples, and so on

Published books

Commercially available reference texts