This is an update on the Kickstarter campaign I am running in support of my Python 101 book: We made it halfway through the campaign and I think we’re going to reach our first stretch goal! Speaking of stretch goals, I was thinking I should go ahead and announce a couple more. Stretch Goal #2: […]
Python 101 – We’re Halfway Through the Campaign! Read More »
It’s time for another update! I want to apologize for not writing sooner, but I’ve been without  internet for several days and I’m writing this from my phone. I just wanted to let you all know that I’m planning to finish part two this week. I’ve had some people ask if I plan to release
Python 101 – Writing Update Read More »
I had a lot of ideas for the cover of Python 101. My first idea was to go to the zoo and take some photographs of Pythons there, then pick the right one stick that on the cover. I have a lot of photo editing software, so I also considered taking the photo and changing
Python 101 Book: Behind the Scenes – The Cover Read More »
Python has a vast library of modules that are included with its distribution. The csv module gives the Python programmer the ability to parse CSV (Comma Separated Values) files. A CSV file is a human readable text file where each line has a number of fields, separated by commas or some other delimiter. You can
Python 101: Reading and Writing CSV Files Read More »
Python has a number of different concurrency constructs such as threading, queues and multiprocessing. The threading module used to be the primary way of accomplishing concurrency. A few years ago, the multiprocessing module was added to the Python suite of standard libraries. This article will be focused on the threading module though.
Python Concurrency: An Intro to Threads Read More »
I’m sure some of you have been wondering if I had a more concrete outline of the book that I am currently writing. As a matter of fact, I do. Here’s what I have so far: Part One: Learning the Basics Chapter 1 – IDLE Chapter 2 – Strings Chapter 3 – Lists, Tuples and
Python 101: Book Outline Read More »
My readers have been asking me to write a book for a few years now and I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and give it a go. For my first book, I decided to write something that’s for beginners and intermediate programmers. There will be four parts to the book with the first part
ANN: Python 101 – The Book! Read More »
Last year, Packt Publishing asked me to be a technical reviewer for a book called Python High Performance Programming by Gabriele Lanaro. It was published in December, 2013. For those of you with short attention spans, I give you my short review: Quick Review Why I picked it up: I got it for free, but
eBook Review: Python High Performance Programming Read More »
I work with a lot of dictionaries at my job. Sometimes the dictionaries get really complicated with lots of nested data structures embedded within them. Recently I got a little tired of trying to remember all the keys in my dictionaries so I decided to change one of my dictionaries into a class so I
Python 101: How to Change a Dict Into a Class Read More »
The people at Packt Publishing recently sent me an ebook copy of Raúl Garreta and Guillermo Moncecchi’s book, Learning scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python to review. Machine learning isn’t a topic I’m very familiar with, but I gave the book a shot as it sounded interesting. I’ll start off with my quick review for those
eBook Review: Learning scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python Read More »
Python’s logging module has lots of options. In this article, we will looks at the logging module’s ability to create Rotating Logs. Python supports two types of rotating logs: Rotate logs based on size (RotatingFileHandler) Rotate the logs based on some time interval (TimedRotatingFileHandler) Let’s spend some time learning how each of these two types
Python: How to Create Rotating Logs Read More »
What’s the most popular language of 2013? According to CodeEval.com, it’s Python! If you compare that with TIOBE, Python is only at #8, but at least it’s still in the top ten! Hopefully Python will continue to gain in the ranks and be used in many new places in 2014. You might also find the
Most Popular Language on CodeEval.com? Python! Read More »
One of my friends on the wxPython Google Group asked how to catch any exception that happens in wxPython. The problem is complicated somewhat because wxPython is a wrapper on top of a C++ library (wxWidgets). You can read about the issue on the wxPython wiki. Several wxPython users mentioned using Python’s sys.excepthook to catch
wxPython: How to Catch All Exceptions Read More »
Sometimes when you are coding, you want to know how long it takes for a particular function to run. This topic is known as profiling or performance tuning. Python has a couple of profilers built into its Standard Library, but for small pieces of code, it’s easier to just use Python’s timeit module. Thus, timeit
How to Time Small Pieces of Python Code with timeit Read More »
I’ve been thinking about creating a simple downloading script with wxPython for quite a while. Then I saw someone on StackOverflow asking about how to do it and I decided it was time to figure it out. Downloading a file with Python is trivial. I wrote about a couple of different ways to do that
wxPython: Creating a File Downloading App Read More »