I have a new resolution: every so often, I'm going to read over the current builtins section of the Python documentation.

I've come to this because recently I was reading through a page on Python idioms to see if it had anything new, and stumbled over the mention of an enumerate() builtin, new in Python 2.3. Well, I'm using Python 2.3, and I hadn't remembered enumerate() , and I could have used it recently. Whoops.

I do try to keep up with release notes and other sources of Python news and discussion (eg, Planet Python ). But it's easy to forget about smaller things (or only remember them vaguely) in the time between I read about a new bit and when I can use it. Clearly I need to give myself a refresher every so often.

(If I was really ambitious I would periodically scan the entire Python Library Reference , at least reading the one sentence description of all the modules. I don't think I'm that energetic, though.)