If you are a true beginner; ALWAYS maintain an interactive shell (even if you write your code and tutorials in an editor) and make extensive use of help(whatever_you_need_help_with) and dir(whatever) .
For instance:
>>> a = "foobar" >>> dir(a) ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs','find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle','isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust','rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title','translate', 'upper', 'zfill'] >>> help(a.title) Help on built-in function title: title(...) S.title() -> string Return a titlecased version of S, ie words start with uppercase characters, all remaining cased characters have lowercase. >>> a.title() 'Foobar'