In this tutorial on Python decorators, you’ll learn what they are and how to create and use them. Decorators provide a simple syntax for calling higher-order functions. By definition, a decorator is a function that takes another function and extends the behavior of the latter function without explicitly modifying it. This sounds confusing, but it’ll make more sense after you’ve seen a few examples of how decorators work. You can find all the examples from this tutorial by downloading the […]

PEP 8, sometimes spelled PEP8 or PEP-8, is a document that provides guidelines and best practices on how to write Python code. It was written in 2001 by Guido van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, and Alyssa Coghlan. The primary focus of PEP 8 is to improve the readability and consistency of Python code. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to: Write Python code that conforms to PEP 8 Understand the reasoning behind the guidelines laid out in PEP […]

In January 2024, Python 3.13.0a3 was released! With several exciting features, improvements, and optimizations, this release is the third of six planned alpha releases. During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase on May 7. This is a pre-release, and you shouldn’t use it for production environments. However, it’s a great way to try out some new and exciting language features. The steering council had its elections last December, and the Python […]

When you’re doing string interpolation in your Python code, you often need to format the interpolated values to meet some formatting requirements. To do this, Python provides what is known as the format mini-language, which defines the syntax of a format specifier. Perhaps you’re comfortable working with strings, but you want to take even more control of them. With proficiency in the format mini-language, you’ll be able to use format specifiers to do things like formatting numbers as currency values, […]

If you’re writing numeric Python code, Numba can be a great way to speed up your program. By compiling a subset of Python to machine code, Numba lets you write for loops and other constructs that would be too slow in normal Python. In other words, it’s similar to Cython, C, or Rust, in that it lets you write compiled extensions for Python. Numba code isn’t always as fast as it could be, however. This is where profiling is useful: […]

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Raising and Handling Python Exceptions A Python program terminates as soon as it encounters an error. In Python, an error can be a syntax error or an exception. In this tutorial, you’ll see what an exception is and how it differs from a syntax error. After that, you’ll learn about raising exceptions and making […]