Over the weekend, I spent some time rearranging ideas for my latest book such that I have have four specific sections of the book. Here they are: Part I – Intermediate Modules Chapter 1 – The argparse module Chapter 2 – The collections module Chapter 3 – The contextlib module (Context Managers) Chapter 4 – […]
Python 201 Book Outline Read More »
This week we welcome Massimo DiPierro (@mdipierro) as our PyDev of the Week! Massimo is the inventor and lead developer of web2py, but he’s also contributed to lots of other projects which you can see on his github profile. He is also the author of the following books: Annotated Algorithms in Python: with Applications in
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Python’s collections module has specialized container datatypes that can be used to replace Python’s general purpose containers. The one that we’ll be focusing on here is the namedtuple which you can use to replace Python’s tuple. Of course, the namedtuple is not a drop-in replacement as you will soon see. I have seen some programmers
Python 201: namedtuple Read More »
I noticed that CodeEval put out a post that Python is their most popular programming language for 5 years in a row! Admittedly, their Python usage has dropped 14% while others have gained, but Python has still managed to stay in the lead.
Python Most Popular For 5 Years Straight on CodeEval Read More »
This week we welcome Hynek Schlawack (@hynek) as our PyDev of the Week! Hynek is an avid member of the Python community and a fellow of the Python Software Foundation. He has contributed to many projects and writes his own Python blog. Let’s spend some time getting to know him better! Can you tell us
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I am happy to announce my latest project, which is the sequel to my Python 101 book: Python 201 – Intermediate Python. I am launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund its publication so if you’re interested in supporting, you can do so here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/34257246/python-201-intermediate-python If you already know the basics of Python and now
ANN: Python 201 Book Kickstarter Read More »
This week we welcome Chris Moffitt (@chris1610) as our PyDev of the Week! Chris has been an active writer about Python on his blog and a speaker at DjangoCon. Let’s spend a few moments getting to know him better. Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc): I currently live near St.
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One of the first items you learn as a beginner Python programmer is how to import other modules or packages. However, I’ve noticed that even people who have used Python casually for multiple years don’t always know how flexible Python’s importing infrastructure is. In this article, we will be looking at the following topics: Regular
Python 101: All about imports Read More »
This week we welcome Brett Cannon (@brettsky) as our PyDev of the Week. He is a Python core developer (since 2003!) and a Python blogger. Brett has been a speaker at PyCon for several years. You can check out some of his talks on YouTube (for example How to make your code Python 2/3 compatible).
PyDev of the Week: Brett Cannon Read More »
Today one of my coworkers came and got me so that I could explain some weird Python code they’d found. It dealt with cmake, but since it was internal code, I won’t be able to show it here. Instead, I wrote up something that has the same issues so you can see what I consider
Python: An Example of Bad Monkey Patching Read More »
A cache is a way to store a limited amount of data such that future requests for said data can be retrieved faster. In this article, we’ll look at a simple example that uses a dictionary for our cache. Then we’ll move on to using the Python standard library’s functools module to create a cache.
Python: An Intro to caching Read More »
Python fairly recently added partial support for function overloading in Python 3.4. They did this by adding a neat little decorator to the functools module called singledispatch. This decorator will transform your regular function into a single dispatch generic function. Note however that singledispatch only happens based on the first argument’s type. Let’s take a
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This week we welcome Cyrille Rossant (@cyrillerossant) as our PyDev of the Week! Cyrille is one of the core developers behind the VisPy project. He is also the author of several Python books like Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization and IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook. His blog is also well worth
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Reportlab is really nice tool for creating PDFs in Python. A little known fact is that they now support adding charts or graphs to your PDF. Previously if you wanted that functionality, you would have to do all the drawing code yourself. Unfortunately, the Reportlab guide doesn’t really explain how to use their charts, what
Reportlab – How to Add Charts / Graphs Read More »
There is a little known tool that I wanted to talk about today. It is called wraps and it’s a part of the functools module. You can use wraps as a decorator to fix docstrings and names of decorated functions. Why does this matter? This sounds like a weird edge case at first, but if
Python – How to use functools.wraps Read More »