In this series looking at features introduced by every version of Python 3, this one is the first of two covering release 3.4. We look at a universal install of the pip utility, improvements to handling codecs, and the addition of the asyncio and enum modules, among other things.

The fourth Python 3.x release brought another slew of great new features. So many, in fact, that I’ve split this release into two articles, of which this is the first. Highlights in this part include yield from expressions, mocking support in unittest and virtualenv suppport in the standard library.

I was slow to make the transition from Python 2 to 3 in the first place, and I never felt like I kept up properly with the new features. So I’m going to aim to do a series of articles looking at a different Python version in each and go through the new features added and catch myself up properly. This one addresses features added in Python 3.0 beyond those already in 2.6, including Unicode by default, type annotations, and exception chaining.