Yesterday, Philip Guo made the claim that Python is now the most popular introductory teaching language at top U.S. universities on the Communications of the ACM blog. I came across this information via Planet Python’s redistribution of Vasudev Ram’s blog post on the subject. If this is true, then I think this is really cool. […]
Python Most Popular University Teaching Language? Read More »
Packt Publishing recently asked me if I would be interested in letting my readers know about a sale that they are doing right now. Most of the time, I avoid marketing to my readers, but Packt has a lot of Python ebooks for sale this week that I think you might find useful. Here is
Packt Publishing is having a Sale on Python books this week Read More »
Last week, DZone contacted me to ask if I would like to be featured in their “Dev of the Week” series. In other words, they wanted to do a short interview with me. The interview went live yesterday. You can read it here, if you like: http://java.dzone.com/articles/dev-week-mike-driscoll I don’t know why the link is on
My First Interview Read More »
Last year there was an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in support of PyDev, the Python IDE plugin for Eclipse. It was put on by the primary developer of PyDev, Fabio Zadrozny. As a part of that campaign, Fabio also created LiClipse. Anyway, Fabio is at it again with a new crowdfunding campaign. You can read about
PyDev and Python profiler UI Crowdfunding Project Read More »
This contest is now over I have decided to sponsor a contest for my first book, Python 101. I will be giving away 3 copies of my eBook bundle (PDF, EPUB and MOBI) and 1 copy of the paperback, which I will ship anywhere in the world. If you haven’t heard of my book, you
Book Contest: Win a Copy of Python 101 Read More »
eGenix announced this week that they were releasing an “open source, one file, no installation version of Python”. You can read their entire announcement in their press release here. If you want to check out the actual product, you can get it at the following URL: http://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/. This is a Unix-based Python and they state
PyRun – Running Python with a Single File Read More »
Every once in a while, I run into a situation where I need dummy data to test my code against. If you need to do tests on a new database or table, you will run into the need for dummy data often. I recently came across an interesting package called Faker. Faker’s sole purpose is
Python: Create Fake Data with Faker Read More »
Recently I ran into an issue where an application that calls Python would insert int into Python’s namespace, which overwrites Python’s built-in int function. Since I have to use the tool and I needed to use Python’s int function, I needed a way around this annoyance. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to fix. All you
Working Around Shadowed Functions Read More »
My first book, Python 101 has been published today. You can buy it directly from my blog which will get you a PDF, EPUB and MOBI version of the book. You can also purchase a softcover edition of the book via Lulu. Finally, I have published the eBook to Amazon. If you happen to run
Python 101 Book Published Today! Read More »
Python 101, the book I am authoring is nearly finished. I had a couple of “proof” copies produced by Lulu to verify things were laying out correctly and to help me find mistakes. Seeing it in print is pretty cool. It also made some oversights pretty obvious, although they’re all cosmetic in nature. Anyway, right
Python 101 Book Writing Update Read More »
This contest is over! Packt Publishing has partnered with my blog to give away 2 copies of their ebook version of Mastering Object-oriented Python by Steven Lott. You can read my full book review here, but frankly, I thought it was one of best advanced Python books I’ve read in a long time. It’s also
eBook Contest: Win a Free Copy of Mastering Object-oriented Python Read More »
Packt Publishing asked me to be a technical reviewer for one of their latest Python books, Mastering Object-Oriented Python by Steven Lott. This book is a sequel of sorts to their 2010 release, Python 3 Object Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips, which I reviewed here. Note: This book is explicitly for Python 3 developers and
Book Review: Mastering Object-Oriented Python Read More »
Kivy is a neat package that allows Python developers to create user interfaces on mobile devices. You can also deploy the applications to desktops too. This is the second book I’ve seen put out on the subject. The first book, Kivy – Interactive Applications in Python by Roberto Ulloa came out last year from Packt
eBook Review: Creating Apps in Kivy Read More »
Last month we looked at how to create Microsoft Excel (i.e. *.xls) files using the xlwt package. Today we will be looking at how we can read an *.xls/*.xlsx file using a package called xlrd. The xlrd package can be run on Linux and Mac as well as Windows. This is great when you need
Reading Excel Spreadsheets with Python and xlrd Read More »
Reportlab recently released version 3.1 which now fully supports Python 3 and Python 2.7. They had actually released a Python 3 compatible version about a month or so ago, but this one sounds like they’ve worked the bugs out of that initial release as this version also supports their commercial customers. I find this exciting
Reportlab for Python 3 is here! Read More »