A Byte of Python

Getting Help

If you need to get quick information about any built-in stuff in Python, then you can use the help functionality. This is useful to get quick information about what we are trying to use. For example, text is referred to as a string of characters in Python and strings are represented by instances of the str class (We will explore these terminologies in later chapters. Let us concentrate on the help functionality for now). In the interpreter prompt, run the command help(str) and it should show up lot of terse information about the str class. Press q to exit from the help.

You can always refer to the official documentation for lots of useful information. In Windows, click on Start -> Programs -> ActiveState ActivePython 2.4 -> ActivePython Documentation to view the full documentation. On Linux/BSD systems, the location of the documentation is specific to the type of the system. For example, on some systems, you will find the docs at /usr/share/doc/python-docs-2.4/html/. You can find out this information using the package management software of your system.