Python Course

A separate page for discussions

Introduction

Books:

• http://www.diveintopython.net/ - really good, but a little bit dated
• http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ - seems good, even if a little basic (but I have not read it)

IDE:

• IDLE: http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/idle/index.html
• Wing IDE: http://www.wingware.com/
• Eric: http://eric-ide.python-projects.org/
• Eclipse & PyDev plugin: http://pydev.org/
• pyscripter: http://code.google.com/p/pyscripter/
• also, http://bit.ly/tgMCbD

Official:

• Download: http://www.python.org/ (remember to grab 2.x branch -- current version is 2.7.3)
• Documentation: http://docs.python.org/2.7/
• Tutorial: http://docs.python.org/2.7/tutorial/index.html
• Library Reference: http://docs.python.org/2.7/library/index.html

Things to start with

• setuptools: http://packages.python.org/distribute/easy_install.html

Essential libraries:

• numpy / scipy
• matplotlib

2013.01.23

Things I have talked about today (non-obvious and important stuff in bold):

• Hello, world!
• list / dictionary / string / number / tuple / set
• functions
  • default arguments, keyword arguments, variable argument lists
  • anonymous functions / lambda
• exceptions
• if / for / while / else / break / continue
  • else also works for loops
• variables & assignment
  • pass-by-reference semantics
  • difference between = and ==
• generators / iterators
• list comprehension / generator comprehension / dictionary comprehension
• string formatting
• modules / import / import as / import from
• classes
  • special methods: __init__ / __str__ / __eq__ / __call__ / ...
  • descriptors
• advanced ideas
  • decorators
  • metaclasses

Things I did not have time to talk about but I wanted to... modules in standard library you should definitely know about:

• sqlite3
• collections (especially defaultdict)
• re
• datetime
• threading / multiprocessing / Queue
• random
• itertools / functools
• os / sys / shutil / os.path
• pickle
• md5
• subprocess
• socket
• urllib / httplib / email / cgi / urlparse / cookielib
• pdb (especially pm)
• win32api / win32gui

Additional

Advanced stuff:

• http://lanyrd.com/2011/europython/sftym/

Fun:

• http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

library Presentations

• NumPy and SciPy (presented by Wagner) File:Python course (scipy and numpy) (Wagner).zip
• Scikit (presented by Jens)
• Matplotlib (presented by Saeed) File:Matplotlib pres.zip