Using Python after a few years of Ruby

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> 1) Rake - is there an equivalent of Rake? I've seen a bit about SCons,
> and it looks really nice, but it seems geared towards being a Make
> replacement for C/C++ rather than something that's used to work with
> Python itself. Is there anything like a Python build tool?

Depends on what you want the build process to do. For Python packages
themselves, distutils/setuptools should be sufficient (and it's
extensible if you find it insufficient).

It's the defacto standard - nearly every Python package comes with
a setup.py. Use setup.py build, setup.py install, setup.py
bdist_wininst, etc.

> 4) Unit Test frameworks - If there's a behavioral test suite like
> RSpec that's be awesome, but I'd be happy to settle for a good, solid
> unit testing system.

The unittest module is in the standard library.

Regards,
Martin