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Tapping Into the Zen of Python (Summary)

Will Mead
Tapping Into the Zen of Python Will Mead 01:26
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In this video course, you’ve explored the Zen of Python, a humorous poem listing opinionated Python philosophies authored by Tim Peters. Along the way, you’ve learned how it originated, what some of its aphorisms mean, and whether you should follow them.

You’ve also uncovered several inside jokes and references hidden in the Zen of Python, which is now an important part of Python’s culture. Now that you know the story behind it, why don’t you take a few minutes and read the Zen of Python one more time to appreciate its true brilliance?

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00:00 Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of this course on the Zen of Python. You’ve learned that it’s a poem consisting of 19 aphorisms describing Python’s design philosophy, it was written in 1999 by core Python developer Tim Peters, it’s full of jokes, and more importantly full of advice to help you write better Python.

00:19 That advice includes the following quotes: “Beautiful is better than ugly”, “Explicit is better than implicit”, “Flat is better than nested”, “Sparse is better than dense”, and “Readability counts”.

00:32 Some of the advice came in the form of contradictions, which prompted you to think about balancing guidelines with practicality, and ultimately deciding what works best for you and your project.

00:43 You then saw there are features in Python like decorators and type hints, which are themselves straying from the rules, but are very practical. If you’re ever in any doubt, you can always import this and remind yourself of this important advice.

00:58 To learn more about the Zen of Python, you can read the article for this course, entitled What Exactly Is the Zen of Python? If you want to learn more about list comprehensions and efficient looping, you can read the excellent Python List Comprehension tutorial.

01:13 And for more information about PEP 8 and how to apply it to your code, you can follow the course Writing Beautiful Pythonic Code With PEP 8.

01:21 Best of luck with all your coding projects, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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