Saturday, April 17, 2010

Python Resources

For the past few months my creative energies have been tied-up with Python.
At work, I am building a Django website, including a web-based project management application. I can't report how Django compares to other web frameworks, since I haven't used any others (like Turbo-Gears and Zope). From my minimal exposure to PHP, I can say I much prefer Python.
At home, I am about to start writing my own note-taking/ productivity application with the working title "Sally Forth!" (an Army of Darkness reference). I've been tracking my ideas and responsibilities in mind-maps for a few years, and that has proved problematic. It has been serviceable for work-related things, but when it comes to art and tinkering projects, it has fallen flat because none of my art or design ideas are little-boxes-inside-big-boxes, they are a confused knot of associations by their very nature. I have learned to accept this. "Sally Forth!" will be based on tagging and faceted search, inspired by a great talk I watched by the author of "Everything is Miscellaneous". (Link.) The application is going to use wxPython on the GUI side, and I haven't decided what to use yet on the database side.
Alex, you asked me a few months ago about Python resources that are out there. I've found a few since then that are definitely worth sharing:
  • MIT's introductory computer science course uses Python. All of the lectures, homework and tests are free to download. They're terrific. I've only worked through the eighth lecture, so far, but I plan on completing it sometime. The prof's stated goal for the course is to teach how to leverage computation to solve problems. I'm all for that! If you also wish to work through it, perhaps we could compare homework solutions. (Link.)
  • There are oodles of videos from the PyCon conference posted. They can be up to three hours long, and are very topical. But seeing a particular library or methodology demonstrated in great depth can be really valuable.(Link.)
  • PyWeek is a home-brew game programming challenge. Its site is a great resource because of the large volume of working code samples that are short enough to be digestable.(Link.)
  • ShowMeDo is also a good resource.(Link.)

1 comment:

Mr. Alex said...

Thanks Pete!