MongoDB and Python

Finding Reference Documentation

MongoDB, Python, 10gen’s PyMongo driver and each of the Web frameworks mentioned in this book all have good reference documentation online.

For MongoDB, we would strongly suggest bookmarking and at least skimming over the official MongoDB manual which is available in a few different formats and constantly updated at http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Manual. While the manual describes the JavaScript interface via the mongo console utility as opposed to the Python interface, most of the code snippets should be easily understood by a Python programmer and more-or-less portable to PyMongo, albeit sometimes with a little bit of work. Furthermore, the MongoDB manual goes into greater depth on certain advanced and technical implementation and database administration topics than is possible in this book.

For the Python language and standard library, you can use the help() function in the interpreter or the pydoc tool on the command line to get API documentation for any methods or modules. For example:

pydoc string

The latest Python language and API documentation is also available for online browsing at http://docs.python.org/.

10gen’s PyMongo driver has API documentation available online to go with each release. You can find this at http://api.mongodb.org/python/. Additionally, once you have the PyMongo driver package installed on your system, a summary version of the API documentation should be available to you in the Python interpreter via the help() function. Due to an issue with the virtualenv tool mentioned in the next section, “pydoc” does not work inside a virtual environment. You must instead run python -m pydoc pymongo.