Fluent Python

DIAL_CODES = [
... (86, 'China'),
... (91, 'India'),
... (1, 'United States'),
... (62, 'Indonesia'),
... (55, 'Brazil'),
... (92, 'Pakistan'),
... (880, 'Bangladesh'),
... (234, 'Nigeria'),
... (7, 'Russia'),
... (81, 'Japan'),

Chapter 1, “Data Structures” of Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition (O’Reilly) by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones has many recipes focusing on sequences, including “Recipe 1.11. Naming a Slice,” from which I learned the trick of assigning slices to variables to improve readability, illustrated in our Example 2-11.
The second edition of Python Cookbook was written for Python 2.4, but much of its code works with Python 3, and a lot of the recipes in Chapters 5 and 6 deal with sequences. The book was edited by Alex Martelli, Anna Martelli Ravenscroft, and David Ascher, and it includes contributions by dozens of Pythonistas. The third edition was rewritten from scratch, and focuses more on the semantics of the language—particularly what has changed in Python 3—while the older volume emphasizes pragmatics (i.e., how to apply the language to real-world problems). Even though some of the second edition solutions are no longer the best approach, I honestly think it is worthwhile to have both editions of Python Cookbook on hand.
The official Python Sorting HOW TO has several examples of advanced tricks for using sorted and list.sort.
PEP 3132 — Extended Iterable Unpacking is the canonical source to read about the new use of *extra as a target in parallel assignments. If you’d like a glimpse of Python evolving, Missing *-unpacking generalizations is a bug tracker issue proposing even wider use of iterable unpacking notation. PEP 448 — Additional Unpacking Generalizations resulted from the discussions in that issue. At the time of this writing, it seems likely the proposed changes will be merged to Python, perhaps in version 3.5.

An object is hashable if it has a hash value which never changes during its lifetime (it needs a __hash__() method), and can be compared to other objects (it needs an __eq__() method). Hashable objects which compare equal must have the same hash value. […]

>>> l = list(range(10))
>>> l
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> l[2:5] = [20, 30]
>>> l
[0, 1, 20, 30, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> del l[5:7]
>>> l
[0, 1, 20, 30, 5, 8, 9]
>>> l[3::2] = [11, 22]
>>> l
[0, 1, 20, 11, 5, 22, 9]
>>> l[2:5] = 100
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
TypeError: can only assign an iterable
>>> l[2:5] = [100]
>>> l
[0, 1, 100, 22, 9]

In Python code, line breaks are ignored inside pairs of [], {}, or (). So you can build multiline lists, listcomps, genexps, dictionaries and the like without using the ugly \ line continuation escape.

was the equivalent of len (you’d write #s). When used as an infix operator, written x#s, it counted the occurrences of x in s, which in Python you get as s.count(x), for any sequence s.

ue or False.

By default, instances of user-defined classes are considered truthy, unless either __bool__ or __len__ is implemented. Basically, bool(x) calls x.__bool__() and uses the result. If __bool__ is not implemented, Python tries to invoke x.__len__(), and if that returns zero, bool returns False. Otherwise bool returns True.

you only implement one of these special methods, choose __repr__, because when no custom __str__ is available, Python will call __repr__ as a fallback.