Well, if you want to get an in depth understanding of best practices and how to write Pythonic code with the latest version of Python (3.8 as of this writing), then Effective Python, Second Edition by Brett Slatkin is a good book for doing just that. In addition to giving current best practices, it also present how a number of things were done in the past, which is quite useful if you need to look through legacy code that might not by following all the current best practices. And let's face it, in the world of programming, that's a pretty common occurrence.
As I took the book club through this book, I took things in a bit of a different direction. I had the preparation of practice problems for each chapter, and the presentation of them, assigned out to different member of the book club. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I know from experience that the one who teaches is the one who learns the most by far, and it was good to spread this opportunity around. Secondly, to be quite honest, it freed up some of my time to focus on other projects on my plate.
In preparation for this, I wrote an article going over how I figured the developer book club could be systematized, which can be seen here:
The Developer Book Club System
Following this, I was the presenter for the first chapter of the book:
Chapter 1: exercise and answer
In addition to this, while coming up with the exercise, I recorded my thought process for coming up with a practice problem, which can be found in this article:
My Thought Process For Creating an Exercise Problem
After this, it was time for others in the group to take a turn. During this process, there were plenty in the group that had vastly different styles of presenting compared to what I typically do, and it gave me an opportunity to learn some of the benefits of these other presentation styles. I wrote up a number of posts covering my thoughts on some of these presentations:
Another Approach to Building Exercise Problems
Presenting by Using Examples from the Book
When Presenting, It can be Worthwhile to Add a Fun Twist to the Problem
It is also worth noting that people stepped up and made it work. The only other presentations that I did for the book were on chapter 8, where I needed to cover for someone due to extraneous circumstances, and the last chapter, chapter 10, where I simply didn't find someone to fill that spot. My practice problems for these chapters can be found here:
Chapter 8: exercise and answer
Chapter 10: exercise and answer
And with that, we've managed to get through another book, and learned a few more things. The group decided that we needed a breather before getting started in on the next book, so we'll plan to take about a month and a half off, during which time we'll work on getting through the busy season for our company, and after that, we'll look into picking up our next book.
