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Python threads - a first example If you have a process that you want to do several things at the same time, threads may be the answer for you. They let you set up a series of processes (or sub-processes) each of which can be run independently, but which can be brought back together later and/or co-ordinated as they run

So here is my own personal gentle introduction to using pdb. It assumes that you are not using any IDE -- that you're coding Python with a text editor and running your Python programs from the command line.

What idioms should I use to make my code easier to read? Read "The Python Cookbook", especially the first few chapters. It's a great source of well-written Python code examples.

Use function factories to create utility functions. Often, especially if you're using map and filter a lot, you need utility functions that convert other functions or methods to taking a single parameter. In particular, you often want to bind some data to the function once, and then apply it repeatedly to different objects. In the above example, we needed a function that multiplied a particular field of an object by 3, but what we really want is a factory that's able to return for any field name and amount a multiplier function in that family:

Use zip and dict to map fields to names. zip turns a pair of sequences into a list of tuples containing the first, second, etc. values from each sequence. For example, zip('abc', [1,2,3]) == [('a',1),('b',2),('c',3)]. You can use this to save a lot of typing when you have fields in a known order that you want to map to names: