When you’re first starting out as a Python programmer, you don’t think about how you might need to install an external package or module. But when that need appears, you’ll want to know how to in a hurry! Python packages can be found all over the internet. Most of the popular ones can be found […]
Python 101 – Installing Packages Read More »
The lxml.objectify sub-package is extremely handy for parsing and creating XML. In this article, we will show how to create XML using the lxml package. We’ll start with some simple XML and then try to replicate it. Let’s get started!
Python: Creating XML with lxml.objectify Read More »
There are a couple of ways to create Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with Python. You can use PyWin32’s win32com.client method, which was discussed in an old article a number of years ago or you could use the xlwt package. We’ll be looking at the latter in this article. You will learn how to create an Excel
Creating Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets with Python and xlwt Read More »
The Python 101 book campaign finished today. I am now well funded to create the book and get all the artwork done. I think I may try to get additional illustrations too. While we didn’t hit the next stretch goal, I plan to go ahead and work on screencasts anyway. As I mentioned previously, I
Python 101 Book Campaign is Finished! Read More »
Code profiling is an attempt to find bottlenecks in your code. Profiling is supposed to find what parts of your code take the longest. Once you know that, then you can look at those pieces of your code and try to find ways to optimize it. Python comes with three profilers built in: cProfile, profile
Python 102: How to Profile Your Code Read More »
Python comes with its own debugger module that is named pdb. This module provides an interactive source code debugger for your Python programs. You can set breakpoints, step through your code, inspect stack frames and more. We will look at the following aspects of the module: How to start the debugger Stepping through your code
Python 101: An Introduction to Python’s Debugger Read More »
There are under 2 days left in the book campaign! I think that’s pretty exciting. I hope you do too! I’ve been busy writing the new Part 3 lately. I only have two more chapters to go before it’s done. My hope is that Part 3 will be done by the end of the week.
Pyhon 101 Book Writing Update #2 Read More »
Python 3.4 released today (2014-03-17) and includes a lot of neat stuff. According to the Python Insider, these are the major changes / additions: PEP 428, a “pathlib” module providing object-oriented filesystem paths PEP 435, a standardized “enum” module PEP 436, a build enhancement that will help generate introspection information for builtins PEP 442, improved
Python 3.4 Released Today! Read More »
Python includes a couple of modules for testing in its standard library: doctest and unittest. We will be looking at doctest in this article. The doctest module will search for pieces of text in your code that resemble interactive Python sessions. It will then execute those sessions to verify that they work exactly as written.
Python Testing with doctest Read More »
Kivy is an open source Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps. The Kivy organization is organizing its second application development contest.! This is a great chance for new and experienced users to show off their skills and compete for prizes. Entries will be
Kivy App Contest 2014 Read More »
Over the weekend, I finished setting up a website for my upcoming book, Python 101. I discovered that www.python101.com is owned by squatters, so I got www.python101.org instead. It will redirect to http://python101.pythonlibrary.org because I think the book should be a part of Python Library while maintaining its independence. There isn’t much content on the
Python 101 Book Website Launched Read More »
We only have five more days before the end of the campaign, so I thought it would be nice to share a couple chapters from the book. You can download the introduction along with chapters 1 and 2 here. I have been working on the new section of the book since it is now the
Python 101 – Book Sample Read More »
The wxPython Google Group was discussing different methods of catching exceptions in wxPython the other day. If you use wxPython a lot, you will soon realize that some exceptions are difficult to catch. The wxPython Wiki explains why. Anyway, the fellows on the list were recommending the use of sys.excepthook. So I took one of
wxPython: Catching Exceptions from Anywhere Read More »
Python decorators are really cool, but they can be a little hard to understand at first. A decorator in Python is a function that accepts another function as an argument. The decorator will usually modify or enhance the function it accepted and return the modified function. This means that when you call a decorated function,
Python 201: Decorators Read More »
Reportlab is a very flexible PDF creation package for Python. You can layout your documents using absolute positioning or by using Flowable objects, such as a Paragraph, a Table or Frame. You can even mix the two together! In this article, we will be looking at how to create some custom Flowables. For example, what
Reportlab: How to Create Custom Flowables Read More »