PyCon 2011: Advanced Python 1 Tutorial

My first tutorial of the day was Advanced Python I with Raymond Hettinger. He is very knowledgeable, but I got stuck in the very back of the room and had a terrible time following him. The speaker went over a bunch of basics of IDLE with Python 3.2. He covered how to open a module and use IDLE’s builtin Class Browser to browse the code quickly.

He then moved on to optimization using itertools (which he wrote?) and functools through a vectorization process. He would show some bad code with lots of function or method calls and then he’d fix the code using part of itertools, functools or both. I think I know a little more about optimization, but I wasn’t up for the second part of the class. Note that this was considered an “Experienced” level tutorial. I guess I’m not quite experienced enough yet, but I hope I will be by next year.