Python Cheat Sheets

Concise Python reference sheets — getting started, basics, intermediate/ advanced, and standard-library fundamentals, all CI-tested: every Python snippet is executed on each push, so the examples always run and never drift out of date. Plus a uv tooling sheet for managing Python, projects, and dependencies.

The sheets

Sheet	Level	Contents	PDF
python-cheat-sheet-getting-started.md	Getting started	Getting Python, the REPL, running a script, indentation & code blocks, comments, output/input & casting, reading a traceback, getting help, and a first taste of variables, types, lists, selection, iteration, functions, and classes	PDF
python-cheat-sheet.md	Basics	Types & dynamic typing, printing, strings (literals, methods, f-string formatting), bytes & encoding, lists, slicing, dicts, tuples/sets, operators, mutability & references, conditionals, ternary & walrus, match/case (incl. guards & patterns), truthy/falsy, loops, range, comprehensions, generators, functions (incl. docstrings & closures), decorators, classes (single & multiple inheritance, dunders, duck typing), error handling, files, modules & packages	PDF
python-cheat-sheet-advanced.md	Intermediate / advanced	Type hints, private attributes & name mangling, properties, dynamic attributes, introspection, abstract base classes, structural typing (Protocol), the iterator protocol, context managers, dataclasses, enums, __repr__/__str__, threading & the GIL, multiprocessing, async/await, pathlib	PDF
python-cheat-sheet-stdlib.md	Standard library	File & console I/O (text/binary, append, standard streams), files/directories/paths (shutil, tempfile), command-line arguments (sys.argv, argparse), environment variables, JSON, Base64, hashing & secrets, datetime, regular expressions, random, collections, subprocess, logging, itertools, csv	PDF
uv-cheat-sheet.md	Tooling	Installing uv on macOS, managing Python versions, creating projects, running code, adding/removing dependencies, coming from pip/venv	PDF

Tested examples

Every fenced ```python block in the four Python sheets is extracted and run by scripts/test_blocks.py on Python 3.14 (the version CI uses; the examples assume Python 3.10+). CI verifies that every block executes; the inline comments showing results (e.g. # [1, 4, 9, 16]) are captured from real runs when written. REPL transcripts and tracebacks in the getting-started sheet use ```text fences, so they are shown but not executed. The uv sheet is shell commands rather than Python, so it is not part of the executed set either; its output comments were captured from real runs by hand.

Run the checks locally — no dependencies, standard library only:

python scripts/test_blocks.py                 # all three Python sheets
python scripts/test_blocks.py some-file.md    # a specific file

The script exits non-zero if any block raises, which is how CI gates changes. A small sandbox is set up automatically (a temp working directory plus a generated mymath.py module and mytools/ package) so the file-I/O and "import your own module/package" snippets run cleanly; input() is stubbed and the multiprocessing snippet's __main__ guard keeps it inert under the test runner.

PDF versions

Each sheet has a PDF version in pdf/, linked from the table above. The PDFs are generated from the markdown by scripts/generate_pdfs.py — regenerate them whenever a sheet changes:

uv run --with markdown-pdf --with linkify-it-py python scripts/generate_pdfs.py

Contributing

Spotted an error or a missing gotcha? Issues and PRs are welcome — CI runs every Python snippet on each push, so fixes are easy to verify.