The Context Manager is one of my favorite features in Python. It can be used for all kind of interesting things around blocks of code. This article gives a background about the origins of the context manager, which problem it solves and how to use it.

When working with XML and Python I often start with just using xml.etree.ElementTree from Python’s standard library. It comes with Python and is sufficient for most projects. But with quite big XML documents (> 1 GiB) parsing becomes slow and lxml.etree shines.

Quick overview about the most important additions in a Python release