I get asked by publishers to review books from time to time. Last month, Packt asked me if I’d be willing to review for their book, Python Projects for Kids by Jessica Ingrassellino. Frankly I tend to avoid beginning Python books now because they tend to be very similar, but I thought this one might […]
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The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used by many companies and organizations for sharing data. Python provides an File Transfer Protocol module in its standard library called ftplib that implements the client side of the FTP protocol. You can learn all about the File Transfer Protocol by reading the RFC 959 document on the Internet.
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This week we welcome Amber Brown (@hawkieowl) as our PyDev of the Week. Amber is one of the core developers of the Twisted package. She has a fun little twisted blog that you might enjoy checking out. You can also see what Amber’s been up to by checking out her Github profile. She has also
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Redirecting stdout to something most developers will need to do at some point or other. It can be useful to redirect stdout to a file or to a file-like object. I have also redirected stdout to a text control in some of my desktop GUI projects. In this article we will look at the following:
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Earlier this year or late 2015, Packt Publishing asked me to be technical reviewer for a book called “Modular Programming with Python” by Erik Westra. It sounded really interesting and it ended up being one of the best books I’ve read from Packt. Note that I am the sole technical reviewer of the book. I’m
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This week we welcome Georg Brandl (@birkenfeld) as our PyDev of the Week. Georg is a core developer of the Python language and has been for over 10 years. He is also a part of the Pocoo team. You can see what projects get him excited by checking out his Github profile. Let’s take a
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Descriptors were introduced to Python way back in version 2.2. They provide the developer with the ability to add managed attributes to objects. The methods needed to create a descriptor are __get__, __set__ and __delete__. If you define any of these methods, then you have created a descriptor. The idea behind the descriptor is to
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The other day, I decided I wanted to create a decorator to catch exceptions and log them. I found a rather complex example on Github that I used for some ideas on how to approach this task and came up with the following: # exception_decor.py import functools import logging def create_logger(): “”” Creates a logging
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Regular expressions are basically a tiny language all their own that you can use inside of Python and many other programming languages. You will often hear regular expressions referred to as “regex”, “regexp” or just “RE”. Some languages, such as Perl and Ruby, actually support regular expression syntax directly in the language itself. Python only
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This week we welcome Kenneth Reitz (@kennethreitz) as our PyDev of the Week! Kenneth is the developer behind the Requests package, which is one of my favorites. He is also the co-author of the upcoming O’Reilly Book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python. You can visit his website to see what he’s been up to or
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This week we welcome R. David Murray (@rdavidmurray) as our PyDev of the Week. Mr. Murray is a core developer of the Python language and is currently maintainer of the email module. He has a Python blog, although it hasn’t been updated in a while. You might want to check out his Github profile to
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I’ve written about super briefly in the past, but decided to take another go at writing something more interesting about this particular Python function. The super built-in function was introduced way back in Python 2.2. The super function will return a proxy object that will delegate method calls to a parent or sibling class of
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What does it mean to benchmark ones code? The main idea behind benchmarking or profiling is to figure out how fast your code executes and where the bottlenecks are. The main reason to do this sort of thing is for optimization. You will run into situations where you need your code to run faster because
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This week we welcome Wesley Chun as our PyDev of the Week! Wesley Chun, MSCS, is author of Prentice Hall’s bestselling “Core Python” series (corepython.com), the “Python Fundamentals” companion videos, co-author of “Python Web Development with Django” (withdjango.com), and has written for Linux Journal, CNET, and InformIT. In addition to being an engineer at Google,
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The other day I ran into a use case where I needed to communicate with a subprocess I had started but I needed it to timeout. Unfortunately, Python 2 does not have a way to timeout the communicate method call so it just blocks until it either returns or the process itself closes. There are
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