Is there a recommended reference manual for python that’s better than the official docs? I’m an experienced programmer (PHP, C#, javascript, and some C most recently), and I find the python manual pretty lacking compared the PHP manual and MSDN. In particular, the official docs never seem to tell me what errors can happen if I pass in something invalid, and there’s apparently not a way to navigate within a module.
Take the os module for example. There’s no list of constants or methods I can call on that page, so I have to Ctrl+f for “stat(” until I find it. Then, once I do find it, it doesn’t tell me what to expect if I call stat with a directory that doesn’t exist, so I just have to try it in a terminal and see what happens.
This seems wildly inefficient… how do python programmers deal with this?
In practice, you either make a quick test program to check the behavior, or read the source code. Much of the Python standard library code is fairly clearly written and in fact rather self-documenting, so it’s standard practice to refer to it when you need to know the nitty-gritty details of how something works.
One exception: with low-level system functions such as many of those in the
osmodule, the functions map directly on to their C namesakes for the underlying platform. So if you need to know about the behavior of Python’sstat, you look up the reference documentation for your platform’s native Cstatcall. In these cases the Python library docs often only explain the basic purpose of the function and how it differs from its C equivalent, if at all.