Learning Python, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. The Documentation Interlude

This chapter concludes Part III with a look at techniques and tools used for documenting Python code. Although Python code is designed to be readable, a few well-placed human-readable comments can do much to help others understand the workings of your programs. Python includes syntax and tools to make documentation easier.

Although this is something of a tools-related concept, the topic is presented here partly because it involves Python’s syntax model, and partly as a resource for readers struggling to understand Python’s toolset. For the latter purpose, I’ll expand here on documentation pointers first given in Chapter 4. As usual, this chapter ends with some warnings about common pitfalls, a chapter quiz, and a set of exercises for this part of the text.

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. Moreover, 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 ...