- Do they know a tuple/list/dict when they see it?
- When to use list vs. tuple vs. dictionary vs. set?
- Can they use list comprehensions (and know when not to abuse them?)
- Can they use tuple unpacking for assignment?
- String building. Do they use “+=” or do they build a list and use .join() to recombine them efficiently?
- Truth-value testing questions and observations (do they write “if x == True” or do they just write “if x”)?
- Basic file-processing (iterating over a file’s lines)
- Basic understanding of exception handling
- Questions about the standard library (”do you know if there’s a standard library for doing X?”, or “in which library would you find [common functionality Y]?”) Most of these are related to the more common libraries such as os/os.path/sys/re/itertools
- Questions about iterators/generators
- Questions about map/reduce/sum/etc family of functions
- Questions about “special” methods (__foo__)
- Can they manipulate functions as first-class objects (Python makes it easy, but do they know how)
- More detailed questions about the std. libraries (such as datetime/email/csv/zipfile/networking/optparse/unittest)
- Questions about testing (unittests/doctests)
- Questions about docstrings vs. comments, and the “Why” of them
- More detailed questions about regular expressions
- Questions about mutability
- Keyword/list parameters and unpacked keyword arguments
- Questions about popular 3rd-party toolkits (BeautifulSoup, pyparsing…mostly if they know about them and when to use them, not so much about implementation details)
- Questions about monkey-patching
- Questions about PDB
- Questions about properties vs. getters/setters
- Questions about classmethods
- Questions about scope/name-resolution
- Use of lambda
- Decorators added in which version?
- SQL-capable DB in which version?
- The difference between “class Foo” and “class Foo(object)”
- Questions from “import this” about pythonic code
- What do they know about various Python web frameworks (knowing a few names is usually good enough, though knowledge about the frameworks is a nice plus) such as Django, TurboGears, Zope, etc.
- What do they know about various Python GUI frameworks and the pros/cons of them (tkinter, wx, pykde, etc)
- Where do they go with Python related questions (c.l.p, google, google-groups, etc)
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