Python Rocks! and other rants

Weblog of Kent S Johnson

For beginning programmers

A list of online tutorials for beginning programmers is here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers.

Two books for beginning programmers:

• Python Programming for the absolute beginner
• Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science

For experienced programmers

If you have previous programming experience, a good list of online tutorials is here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers. The standard tutorial is a good starting point. Dive into Python is a popular tutorial; it is also available in print.

Books for experienced programmers:

• Learning Python
• Beginning Python
• Python in a Nutshell is a brief tutorial and useful reference
• Python Cookbook is a source for useful code snippets and a good way to learn idiomatic Python

Other resources

The Python documentation is generally of very high quality. The Library Reference contains some essential reading that is often overlooked:

• Built-in functions - this section documents all the built-in functions such as len() and open().
• Built-in types - this section documents the built-in types - list, dict, set, str, etc.

The Regular Expression HOWTO is a good introduction to regular expressions. Python comes with a regex tester called redemo.py; look for it in the bin directory of your Python installation.

PEP 249 defines DB-API, Python's standard low-level database interface.

Getting help

The python-tutor mailing list is friendly, helpful and oriented toward newbies. Ask beginner questions here.

The comp.lang.python newsgroup (also available by mail) is a high-volume Usenet newsgroup for general discussions and questions about Python. It is a good place to ask - or search for - more advanced questions. Beginner questions are also welcome but the answers often get sidetracked.

The online Python Cookbook is another good place to browse and search.

Useful extras

BeautifulSoup is a parser for real-world (i.e. broken) HTML. Very useful for web scraping.

IPython is an enhanced Python shell. It has many useful convenience features. Highly recommended.

PyFlakes is a lint tool for Python. It integrates well with TextPad and can help find some types of simple errors.

Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser

Tools

The IDE that comes with Python, called IDLE, is fairly primitive. There are many choices of editors and IDEs that work with Python. Which is "best" is mostly a matter of personal preference. I like TextMate, a payware editor with good syntax coloring and the ability to run Python programs from within the editor. There are many other popular choices. Eclipse+PyDev and Komodo are probably the most popular IDEs that run on Mac OS X. They both have free and payware versions.

Winpdb is a useful windowing debugger. pdb is a simple command-line oriented debugger that comes with Python. Here is a good Winpdb walkthrough.

Puzzles and problems

If you like to learn by solving puzzles and small problems, you might enjoy these:

• The Python Challenge - a series of puzzles of increasing difficulty that will lead you through a bit of the standard library and PIL.
• Sphere Online Judge - write programs to solve short problems. Submit your program to the online judge. You must get the correct result within a limited run-time.
• Project Euler
• CodeKata - a series of learning exercises
• 99 Prolog problems also suitable for Python
• Python practice problems