Python Essentials

Writing documentation with RST markup

While Python code should be beautiful and informative, it doesn't easily provide background or context to show why a particular algorithm or data structure was chosen. We often need to provide these additional details to help people maintain, extend, and make effective use of our software. While we can include a lot of information in a module docstring, it seems best to keep docstrings focused on implementation details, and provide the additional material separately.

We can write additional documentation in a variety of formats. We can use a sophisticated editor with complex file formats, or we can use simple text editors and plain text format. We can even write our documentation entirely in HTML. Python also ...