IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook - Second Edition

Writing high-quality Python code

Writing code is easy. Writing high-quality code is much harder. Quality is to be understood both in terms of actual code (variable names, comments, docstrings, and so on) and architecture (functions, modules, and classes). In general, coming up with a well-designed code architecture is much more challenging than the implementation itself.

In this recipe, we will give a few tips about how to write high-quality code. This is a particularly important topic in academia, as more and more scientists without prior experience in software development need to code.

How to do it...

1. Take the time to learn the Python language seriously. Review the list of all modules in the standard library—you may discover that functions you ...