Last week I was contacted about a cool sounding book project on Kickstarter: Real Python for Web Development, featuring web2py by Michael Herman. I have to admit that I’m not familiar with Mr. Herman or the person who originally contacted me about the book, but since I enjoy reading Python books and this one sounded […]
Real Python for Web Development Book on Kickstarter Read More »
I first heard about Blaze from NumPy’s original developer’s blog back in December 2012. A few days ago, InformationWeek announced that DARPA was funding the project to the tune of $3 million dollars to get some big data libraries written for Python. There will be two new projects, Blaze and Bokeh. Blaze will be an
Python Gets Funded by DARPA for Big Data Project: Blaze Read More »
I was approached by a representative from No Starch Press, the publisher of Python For Kids, to review their book. They provided me with a free dead tree copy and an eBook (PDF) version. This book appears to be in direct competition with Manning’s
Book Review: Python For Kids – A Playful Introduction to Programming Read More »
The other day, I was trying to figure out if there was an easy way to grab a class’s defined attributes (AKA “instance variables”). The reason was that we were using the attributes we created to match up with the fields in a file we parse. So basically we read a file line-by-line and each
How to Get a List of Class Attributes in Python Read More »
I forgot to get this article done for the first of the year as I have in the past. I hope you find some interesting reading material from this tardy post. I also hope my readers have had wonderful holidays and are looking forward to the upcoming year! Note: I use Google Analytics to help
Top Ten Articles of 2012 Read More »
If you do much system administration, then you know that sometimes you have to write scripts that can move files between servers. I’m not really a system administrator by trade, but I did have to do this sort of thing in some of my programs anyway. Python has several 3rd party packages that provide this
Python 101: How to Move Files between Servers Read More »
Some people complained about my last logging article, wondering if it was even necessary since the docs and Doug Hellman have already written on the topic. I sometimes wonder why I write on these topics too, but usually when I do, I get lots of readers. In this case, I’ve gotten almost 10,000 hits just
Python logging with lggr Read More »
I am currently working on a book review for a college course Python book that uses the Python turtle module and Tkinter to help teach the Python programming language. Hopefully I’ll have that book done by the end of the month. In the mean time, it made me decide to give the turtle module a
Python: Using Turtles for Drawing Circles Read More »
Earlier this week, I wrote a simple post about Python’s Queues and demonstrated how they can be used with a threading pool to download a set of PDFs from the United States Internal Revenue Service’s website. Today I decided to try “porting” that code over to Python’s multiprocessing module. As one of my readers pointed
Python Concurrency: Porting from a Queue to Multiprocessing Read More »
Python provides a very powerful logging library in its standard library. A lot of programmers use print statements for debugging (myself included), but you can also use logging to do this. It’s actually cleaner to use logging as you won’t have to go through all your code to remove the print statements. In this tutorial
Python 101: An Intro to logging Read More »
Python comes with a lot of cool concurrency tools builtin, such as threads, Queues, semaphores and multiprocessing. In this article, we’ll spend some time learning how to use Queues. A Queue can be used for first-in-first out or last-in-last-out stack-like implementations if you just use them directly. If you’d like to see that in action,
Python Concurrency: An Example of a Queue Read More »
Every now and then you’ll find yourself needing to load modules or classes dynamically. In other words, you’ll want to be able to import a module without knowing ahead of time which one you’re going to import. In this article, we’ll look at two ways to accomplish this feat in Python. Using the __import__ Magic
Advanced Python – How to Dynamically Load Modules or Classes Read More »
List comprehensions in Python are very handy. They can also be a little hard to understand when and why you would use them. List comprehensions tend to be harder to read than just using a simple for loop as well. We’ll spend some time looking at how to construct list comprehensions and learn how they
Python 201: List Comprehensions Read More »
Today we’re going to take a look at Tkinter! I was curious about how one would go about hiding a frame and then re-showing it using Tkinter and I kept finding threads (like this one) that talked about using withdraw() and deiconify() but didn’t really provide any usable code. In wxPython, I did this sort
Tkinter: How to Show / Hide a Window Read More »
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control versioning tool, similar to git or bazaar. Some might even compare it CVS or Subversion (SVN), although those are not distributed versioning systems. The Python programming core development team chose to switch to Mercurial from SVN a couple years ago and many other high profile 3rd party Python
An Intro to Mercurial Read More »