Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with python

I can FizzBuzz! Where do I go from here?

Phire — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:26:41 -0800

I am teaching myself how to program. But there seems to be a big gap between intro courses/resources (CodeCademy, O'Reilly books, Learn X the Hard Way) and Actually Doing Things. Help me figure out a road plan? I know HTML and CSS pretty well. I know a teeny bit of PHP and JS and MySQL, and even less of AJAX/JSON, but enough to mess around with existing CMSes and hack together simple custom solutions from StackOverflow and Google. I'm starting to learn Python (I've gone through Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way). I've also done the Javascript track on CodeCademy, and I'm starting on the "build a search engine" CS 101 course on Udacity.

I'm finding that a lot of the recommended intro resources for these things kind of start off at the same place - basic logic, loops, conditionals, etc. - and then say "Okay, go do stuff". But the stuff I want to do tends to be several orders of magnitude beyond what the intro books have taught. Shaw's book is a good example of this: I can build a CYOA game in terminal! Great. How does this translate to...actually writing a program with a GUI and how do I integrate this with some form of data storage and oh god there's this thing called garbage collection that everyone talks about and ahh.

A lot of advice you see out there is "just start programming!" but I honestly don't even know where to begin. I see cool projects on Github and I can't begin to understand the source code. I also know enough to know that it's really easy to screw things up, and I feel like I don't know nearly enough (or anything at all) about best practices for writing secure code, minimizing run time.

What I'm looking for:
I do really well with structured/project-based learning, which is why the Udacity course seems promising. Just straight-up reading the documentation of the various languages tends to make my brain spin. Can you recommend a guide / a road plan for how to incrementally step up from FizzBuzz to something resembling Actual Skill? Maybe something like Project Euler that isn't quite as math based.

[Extraneous info, possibly useful]
What I'm already doing:

Trying to work on personal projects that are just a little bit beyond what I feel comfortable with. This is fun, but I also can't help but think I'll have a lot of gaps in my knowledge if I only work on things that I can envision, and I can only envision things that are based on the skills I already know.

Reading StackOverflow to see other people's code, posting stuff on CodeReview when relevant.

Slowly (slowly) working my way through the Python Challenges.

What I would like to do with this skill:

Professionally: be a kick-ass web developer. I work as a front-end dev now, but most of what I do is CMS customization (WP, Drupal) and while that is its own niche, it also seems very limited in terms of professional advancement.

Personally: be one of those people encounters a problem / has an idea and can write a script to fix it. This might include stuff like "I need to find a way to integrate RSS content from disparate sources into a uniform-looking output" or "I want to interact with the Twitter API and do cool textual analysis with it" or anything else.

Blue-sky thinking: get to a place where I could build a web-app/service that is actually helpful (or entertaining) for other people. Not because start-up VC blah, but because helping people is awesome. For example, a thing that I'm building for myself right now is a habit-tracker with lots of built-in data-wankery with respects to streaks, averages, trends, etc. It's just PHP and MySQL right now (I haven't gotten to the "graph this data" stage yet) but I could see this being something that people might want.

Happy little (binary) trees. Is there a Bob Ross of coding?

quadog — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:28:23 -0800

Is there a Bob Ross of coding? I'm looking for a particular style of educational video which shows developers working through problems. It should include a voice over describing what they are trying to accomplish. It should also show the types of decisions they are making as they work through the problem. I'm specifically interested in Python and javascript. On the Python side, anything that includes data science stuff (obtaining, scrubbing, exploring, modeling or interpreting data). On the JS side, if there were videos on data viz libraries (like D3) that would be good.

Anyway, I get an incredible amount of benefit looking over someone's shoulder as they work. Point me to some learning materials!

cs 001: so you don't know what you're doing

lhude sing cuccu — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:59:38 -0800

I need a coding project, and I am completely lost. You guys really helped me decide to leave the nest of Python tutorials and pick a project so I can start learning on my own. However, I don't really know where to start. I've started a few 'projects' online only to discover they used a package I didn't want to waste my time with. Maybe it used PyQt when I wanted to learn PyGTK. But then I read online somewhere that PyGTK has been deprecated in favor of PyGl and I don't know what that means so I give up on that altogether and maybe I should work on something else instead? You get the point.

Then I decided it would make more sense to make a web app, and I installed Apache/mySQL/PHP in order to do this one tutorial I never finished (it assumed a Windows GUI and I got confused after a couple pages). Then I tried Django. Then I tried CherryPy.

The problem is, I have no idea what I am doing or whether I am going off track a lot. Maybe I should learn HTML/CSS before I even look at web frameworks. For example, I installed CherryPy but I don't know what it's actually used for. What is Apache? Do you need it? How many things do you need to work with if you wanted to write a web app (e.g. CherryPy and Apache and Ajax)? And why am I so confused?

This is what I know right now: Websites are made with HTML/CSS. You can put JavaScript on top of it. Ajax is another word for JavaScript. You do things with jQuery and JSON. I don't really know what. You can make a website with Python, but only to connect all the HTML/CSS/JS pieces together. I don't really know how to connect the pieces except that there is some kind of referencing system you use inside the code. To make a website with Python, you can install a web framework. Django is used by most people. CherryPy is for small applications. You put the web framework on top of Apache, but I don't know what Apache is. I think it's some kind of web server. But then you also need web hosting, which you would get from a third party. Do I need to learn alllllllll these languages just to get started on something?

So how would I even get started? I tried Invent with Python but it's not very autonomous, it's kind of just another tutorial. I tried PyGame, and it seems kind of childish and not used for real things.

I also don't know what to focus on. I thought the next step was GUI programming, but then I didn't know whether to pick Qt or GTK, and there seem to be so many other options (Glade?). Then I decided to try web stuff, but realized there are too many pieces to try to fit together that I don't even know how to start building something.

*I'm not married to Python
*I'm trying to learn HTML on Codecademy
*I don't want to use packages that are only used in tutorials but not for real things
*I don't know the difference between back end and front end...I kind of look at them the same since I would probably be doing both making something myself
*How can I just get STARTED on something? I don't care what it is. It just seems like once I start something, things I read reference other things so I assume I have to learn that, which references something else, and it's an endless cycle! I just want to stick to something. Like even with CherryPy, it's all "it's so simple!" but I wouldn't know how to use it without taking two months to read all the documentation...

How to distribute a python Tkinter GUI from one Mac to another

Salvor Hardin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 02:36:29 -0800

I've been writing python software with Tkinter GUIs as a hobby for a while, but for the first time, I've made a some pieces of code that a few other people want to use. Unfortunately, I've been really frustrated by attempts to distribute the software because of incompatibility with Tcl/Tk installations on computers I'm distributing the software to. I'm on a Mac, and I'm distributing to other Macs at this point. I've been using py2app to bundle the code, and I can easily get the apps to run on my machine, but it seems like the slightest version mismatch between the Tkinter that gets bundled and the Tcl/Tk version on the destination machine causes a fatal error. For example, I have tk 8.6.0 installed, abd Tkinter 2.7.3, but the .app that I made wouldn't run on a machine that had tk 8.5.12. It has worked on a computer where the Tcl/Tk installation matched mine, but I obviously can't guarantee that will be the case all the time.

Here's are my related questions:
1. Is there a way to somehow include Tcl/Tk with the py2app bundle so it doesn't depend on the destination machine having the right version?
2. Is there instead a good way to include multiple versions of Tkinter and have software attempt to import each of them until one of them is found to work?
3. Should I give up on doing this with Tkinter? Is there a GUI framework that is more "portable"? I know wxPython is not pure python either, so does that suffer the same issues?
4. Or am I asking the wrong questions here?

Python, Pyglet, Pygame and Py-Me

barnacles — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:32:21 -0800

Which is better: Pyglet or Pygame? I'm moving into Python after too long with Java, and though I'm not looking to build a game or anything I have a project in mind in which I want to have some sort of canvas to draw on programatically, some way of playing sounds, etc. As a result, it seems like one of the game libraries probably offers the best option for getting it done. If that's not correct, please correct me!

It seems like the big two are Pyglet and Pygame, and while I googled for a consensus first, there doesn't seem to be much of one and so I would like to gauge the responses from people on AskMe. I trust allyall more than I trust random Redditors, what can I say?

So, for ease of development, utility, support, performance, whatever else you can think of, which one is the better option for putting sprites and lines on screen and doing cool things with input devices?

Attribute trouble when instantiating a class in Python 2.7

COBRA! — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:10:06 -0800

I'm having maddening problems creating objects in Python. Details inside This is the beginning of a class definition I'm using:

class popObj(object):
"""standalone class mainly holding list of binary trees and generation"""
def _init_(self):
#initializes two empty lists and a generation tracker
self.biTrees=[None]*POP
self.selectedTrees=[None]*POP
self.generation = 0

In the main module of the program, then, I call:

population=popObj()

I'm able to put objects into the list at population.biTrees[] with no problem. But when I try to do anything with population.selectedTrees or population.generation, I get this error:

AttributeError: 'popObj' object has no attribute 'selectedTrees'

What's going on? This is driving me nuts. I recognize that my class definition isn't very elegant, but I can figure out why some of the attributes don't exist.

It's a CMS, a webapp and a database browser: how do I do this?

outlier — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:56:24 -0800

I'm rebuilding a old website that doesn't quite neatly categorize in the it's a blog / it's a CMS / it's a table browser / it's a webapp thingie. After a few years out from web development, it seems fit to examine my whole strategy and ask how best to do this. Years ago, I made a website for a laboratory I was working with. As is usual with these things, severe mission creep set in and it ended up:

* giving CRUD-like access to a database of samples, with record browsing and searching
* providing tools for visualizing, comparing and working with this data in various ways
* It also functioned as a CMS for various groups that used the database or were involved in lab activities, being somewhere they put reference documents, notices and so on.

There was the added complication that some of the website was open to the public, and some parts only for members of particular groups. Being a Python fan, I did the site up in Plone. NEVER DO THIS.

Anyway, to my surprise, the thing has worked fine for 5 years, with next to no maintenance or attention. Now, I'm between jobs and my old colleagues asked me if I can update the site. Which brings me to the main question: what framework should I use?

* I'm a Python guy but I'm done a bit of Rails work as well. Python will be the language of choice unless there's some overwhelmingly superior choice in another language
* Plone is out of the question. Never again.
* By default I thought of Django (which I have a little experience in), but I'm unsure if the mix of record browsing and content would sit well. Also Django's idea of multiple "apps" in a website never seemed to work well to me, with them acting like wholly independent units rather than parts of a single site.
* The task is a bit too involved for the various microframeworks: Flash, Bottle etc.
* The access control / security is pretty important. People shouldn't see what they're not allowed to see.

So what do I use? Are there any new and useful developments in the web framework sphere? Is Django up to the job?

How to beef up on basic Python/Java and get the skinny on databases?

foxy_hedgehog — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:02:42 -0800

I'm interested in taking this Coursera course on data science but the description states that "You will need basic programming experience with Java or Python, and some familiarity with databases." I do not have this. How could I get it, preferably online? I'd be grateful for recommendations for any sites or tools that offer exercises, tutorials, explanations et al. on the relevant languages and on the subject of databases.

I have zero experience in programming aside from some very simple exercises in BASIC decades ago. I have no idea how easy or difficult it is to require "basic programming experience" in either Java or Python, and I have no familiarity with the technical aspects of databases. If you think it's unrealistic to take this course, I would welcome your opinion and/or suggestions for alternatives.

Summer (Winter?) of Code

carolinaherrera — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:37:30 -0800

I'm hoping to find short (2 month-ish to 6 month-ish) full-time, in-person programs that teach practical computer programming skills (Ruby, Python, iOS, PHP, R, Matlab, etc.) I'm hoping to find short full-time, in-person programs that teach practical computer programming skills (Ruby, Python, iOS, PHP, R, Matlab, etc.)

Other details:
- No need to earn a degree, no financial aid needed
- 2 month-ish to 6 month-ish, could be longer or shorter if the right course
- Anywhere in the US or the rest of the world
- Looking for IN-PERSON, skills-based learning. Not Coursera or Udacity unless there is a strong community in-person meetup component.
- No need for computer science theory, etc.; just how to do web or mobile programming itself

Bonuses:
- Programs especially for women
- Project-based learning
- Programs that you know someone who went there/heard good reviews, etc.

Also, programs that teach you how to use R, Matlab, or other statistical packages if you know of any.

Examples: http://www.codefellows.org, https://www.hackerschool.com

Thank you!

How to store mathematical expressions as binary tree objects in Python

COBRA! — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:04:17 -0800

For a project, I need to store mathematical expressions as binary tree objects in Python, with each operator or operand being stored as a node. But I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around it; partly because this is my first real dive into the object-oriented pool and the specific nuts and bolts seem a little bit out of my reach. I've googled some examples that have gotten me part of the way, but most of the Python binary tree code I've found is more concerned with searching and ordering trees, and I keep getting lost in functionalities I don't think I need.

Working in Python 2.7. Thanks!

How can I practice coding? (PS How can I tell if I suck at it?)

lhude sing cuccu — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:15:51 -0800

I'm pretty much a Kindergarten level Python learner. Basically, I'm on Exercise 41 in Learn Python the Hard Way (and confused), and I'm in a 100-level class learning Python. I am not a math person, although I do like formal logic (if that means anything). My biggest problem is that I think I try to solve problems too creatively, i.e. I always try the most complicated/convoluted solution possible, which is usually wrong. But anyway, what are some fun/easy ways to practice coding that will actually keep my attention (and preferably has solutions)? For instance, I've tried Codecademy but it was really dull and I hated the in-browser console, because it only allowed for one right answer (for me that's a big deal! My answer is almost never the "teacher's answer"). I liked the way Code School does it (videos and then challenges and badges...and it breaks it up into small chunx which I really liked), but I ain't got no $25, and I don't think they have Python anyways.

I've tried/didn't like:
Project Euler: This is way too math-oriented and advanced
Singpath: Reminded me too much of Codecademy
LearnStreet: Same...a disorganized site doesn't go well with my disorganized mind too, you know?
Khan Academy: I don't get it?
Checkio.org: Really interesting concept, but it looks too advanced for me
Python Challenge: Seemed more about figuring out the author's intentions and less about coding
Those pseudo-programming sites where you move that stupid turtle

I liked:
Learn Python the Hard Way: I liked how it breaks it up into small pieces and just tells you what to put into your own IDE...it did just tell you what to do, but it also told me why/how it works (which is rare, apparently?)...also, like Code School, breaks it up into very small chunx, one concept at a time
Python.org tutorials...seems like a lot to read though! clean layout though, good job python!

I'm thinking of trying:
Pygame
Django/google's app engine*
Any sites/programs that actually teach Python as a game? Keywords actually teach. Codecademy/LearnStreet were just confusing and just TOLD me stuff, aka not teaching. I don't know. Maybe they work for other people, just not for me.

*Apparently it doesn't have python 3 support, but that's OK I guess. I don't really know how to use it, but it could be interesting. I'm not that interested in web development, but it might be good practice?

I'm getting really irritated with not knowing what/why I am learning or how it's used IRL. I think I would really like to just jump in and start making stuff, because I think I would learn best that way and I really just want to start doing real-world coding, but sadly I don't think I really know enough to be able to do much of that...

TLDR:
I'm about to finish LPTHW and don't know how to continue in a fun and enjoyable manner. I'd prefer something I can just work all the way through (like LPTHW). Thoughts?

Thanks.

***1,000 extra points for pointing me towards anything that has to do with music/audio programs***

Extra questions:

I am just starting out and I am vaguely interested in audio programming and just things that aren't web development/user databases in general (aka what I learned in my brief stint with Rails for Zombies...I shudder to think of the Twitter for Zombies databases...). What should I think about doing down the road? I noticed on github that a lot of the audio programs I like are written with C#. Should I learn that next or something? I don't really know what Python is "used for." I love this stuff!

Do I suck at programming because I am confused? I just came from a CS lab where we had to encrypt a string of letters into new letters. I was lost for an hour until the TA gave me his own answers. I would have never guessed the answer on my own. We didn't exactly learn it in class. Does that mean I'm terrible? It seemed like everyone else needed less help than me...

Best practices for scientific Python prototyping/debugging?

PercussivePaul — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:50:02 -0800

I'm using Python in my research now to build some models and analyze some data. I've done this with Matlab and R in the past and became fairly used to running individual lines or blocks of code at a time and doing a lot of interactive printing and plotting from the console. This behavior seems to be a bit more difficult in Python and I'm trying to find the best way to be productive. The behavior in Matlab is called 'Cell Mode' and it is common in a lot of scientific software. It lets you demarcate code regions with a special comment character, and with Ctrl+Enter you run the current cell where your cursor is located. Cells are kind of like methods but you don't call them -- you move the cursor to run individual cells, or you run all the cells in a file sequentially. Variables within a cell persist after a cell is run.

For complex and large tasks it makes sense to write more 'proper' code, separating data processing and analysis steps into separate methods or files, but most of the time this is overkill, and it makes it harder to do interactive data exploration and plotting.

I currently use an IDE called Spyder which is recommended by other scientific Python users. It has a feature called 'Run selection or current block' which is supposed to replicate this, but it is buggy and breaks if you use loops. I've been looking for another IDE that might have this feature and come up empty and don't have time to try a bunch. Any suggestions?

Alternatively I have been trying to get into a more traditional programming workflow, separating my code into functions and using breakpoints and debuggers when I need to do interactive plotting and printing. I get frustrated by scoping -- variables within functions are local, of course, but I often want to be able to print and plot them as I'm writing the code so I can tweak things, and the only way I can get access to them is to stop execution within that method, but I find breakpoints and debuggers clunky. Maybe I just need to get better at this. I often can't get things to work the way I want, I use a lot of global variables, I find I want to interactively access local variables from other methods that I thought I wouldn't need to, and in general I am wasting time and headspace on this problem when I want to be focusing on my data. What are the best practices here?

Spinning, exploding Excel-driven web app: How or should it be?

metajc — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 08:45:34 -0800

Sometimes, I am a front-end web developer. Frequently, I meet new people at work who want to turn really complicated Excel documents into dazzlingly interactive web applications. Besides Excel's "Save to Web App" or "Save to SharePoint" features, such people ask if I can tap into an industry to support this -- perhaps scads of agencies and web-based or downloadable tools that make "websites" or at least customizable, interactive reports from Excel spreadsheets, data, and calculations. I'm yet to find this an abundance of examples of this. Are there? If so, what do you call them? If you use Google Analytics, MailChimp or Hootsuite, you are familiar with bouncing, cheerful report graphs and charts.

I know that those specific tools required teams and years worth of custom programming. I assume that these apps also derive their presentations from databases that are not Excel files. People seem to passionately believe, however, that there has got to be an easy way to pour Excel spreadsheets into a machine that spits out more simplistic but nonetheless animated pie charts, line charts, map charts, bar charts, etc. You can customize the colors and fonts! Click here to add your logo!

I've been Googling all morning and I see a few discussions on StackOverflow about how to pipe data into and out of this or that via Ruby, Python, Django or PHP. I see a few homebrewed applications that sort of do something via Javascript.

For the sake of specification, say I have an excel file with multiple tabs. Each tab has thousands of rows and nearly 50 columns. The existing Excel charts are based on calculations of those tabs. Is there a web or intranet-friendly tool that will eat that spaghetti and excrete more colorful, JQuery-powered whirligigs?

I don't mean to come off as sarcastic to the believers or naive to those who know. It just seems a tall order to me. Hopefully, I'm wrong.

Maybe we're just not meant to eat python

punchtothehead — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:00:57 -0800

How should I cook python? For Christmas, I received a pound of frozen python fillets. All the recipes and blog entries I've found about cooking python end with "despite my careful preparation, the python ended up tough and rubbery and we threw it out." Part of the problem is that I think it's an incredibly lean, muscular meat. A few of the preparations treated it like other snake meats, and those failed to work with python

I've called the exotic meat suppliers in the area and none of them are sure of how to treat it either. Is there a good way to cook this?

Automated PDF modification

mnemonic — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:55:40 -0800

Is there an automated way of placing elements from one PDF file into another? Open to coding this via Python if a relevant module exists. I have two pdf's, Doc 1 and Doc 2. All pages in both documents are US Letter sized. Doc 1 contains large tables of values (generated in Excel with PDFCreator), one per page; this is the only content on the pages. Doc 2 contains pages with my company's border, and header info (title, page # etc.). Doc 1 tables go into Doc 2 bordered pages. I would like an automated way of taking the tables of Doc 1, and placing each into a separate page in Doc 2, without overlapping elements.

I'm decently proficient in Python and think I could code something if some pdf/vector graphics handling modules exist. I've done nontrivial programming with the xlrd3 module for working with our Excel files. How I think the code for this might work:

Open Doc 1, Doc 2 as vector images
For each page in Doc 1, Doc 2:
- Get content bounds in Doc 1
- Scale content in Doc 1 to fit in Doc 2 borders
- Insert in Doc 2 at [coordinates]

What Python modules would I need to do this? Or any other approaches would be welcome.

Notes
- This task recurs in my work every few weeks, and the pages can total over a hundred. I handle this currently by printing out Doc 2 (page borders), then refeeding the pages into the printer and printing Doc 1. This is inconvenient because the printer often fails to grab the pages, and because I have to run back to my computer to issue the next job (it's not actually 2 files each time, more like 14 separate pairs of such files, that must be printed separately), and occasionally I can get tripped up by coworkers printing over my pages.

- I often paste Excel tables directly into Word docs. This fails here because the formatting gets mangled in Word from having lots of merged cells and landscape oriented tables in portrait orientation pages. I can sort of transpose the tables in Excel, and set the text orientation in Word to vertical, but each table requires a ton of cleanup, and there are many of them.

- I can manually combine the docs by opening the PDFs in Inkscape (or other vector illustrating program), but again, 100+ tables. Inkscape opens up one page at a time.

How to create a heatmap without external services?

fvox13 — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 07:39:00 -0800

How can I create heatmaps of geographic data, without relying on an external web service or API? I've got a large, ever-changing dataset that includes geographic data from almost every country. The data include lat/lon coordinates, ISO country codes, city/region name, and a count (number of "incidents" reported).

As part of a larger, web-browser-based dashboard, I'd like to create a heatmap showing which countries / regions have the most incidents. But, for various reasons, the web server this is on doesn't always have the ability to talk out to the Internet, so it can't rely on an external service, like Google Maps.

Is there a standalone, free-and-open-source package that would let me do this? Needs to run on a linux server with nginx, and bonus points if it's Python.

Which of these CS courses should I take?

lemonadeheretic — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:28:08 -0800

Which introductory computer science course should I take? (I am a very special snowflake.) I'm going to graduate college in Fall '13, and have a hole in my schedule. I would like to get hired to work in recruiting for a start-up in the Bay Area in about a year. To that end, I think it would be really beneficial for me to get some background in programming so that I can at least tell a good programmer from a bad one. I also just want some CS background so that I don't become a 30 year-old with no understanding of how modern society works.

My college doesn't offer CS courses, but we're in a consortium with schools that do. (Those schools are very clear on the point that they don't want prospective cross-enrollment students emailing professors about classes they might want to take, hence why I'm asking here. Also, my academic adviser is a Roman poetry scholar and not very helpful with this issue.)

My options for an intro programming course next semester are:
- 4-credit Java-based Intro to Computer Science for majors at a nearby highly-ranked university that isn't even remotely known for CS.
- 2-credit Python-based course targeted toward "non-majors and majors who want to learn a new language in a structured environment" at the same school. It won't fulfill any prereqs if I want to take more CS courses. If I took this, it'd be on top of a full courseload; otherwise I'd have trouble graduating on time.
- 3-credit Intro to Computing, which doesn't really have much of a description, but is offered at a top engineering school, so it's probably reasonably rigorous/modern. (Also, it might impress people a little if I did well here.) Getting there and back would be a strain compared to the other university, though. I guess this is intended for majors, but it's not very clear.

I don't really have much background in programming, though I've gotten slightly past the "Hello, World" level with both Java and Python before, and I'm trying to carve out a little time to work on it again. I tend to get a little intimidated by programming, I guess. I want to learn a fair amount of theory because it's interesting to me, and I don't think there's much of that in the Python course. However, I would like to be able to play with certain open-source projects eventually, and most of the ones that interest me are Python-based.

Other considerations: I want to go to law school 3-5 years from now, so I do care a little about whether this course will be a GPA killer. I might eventually want to take the patent bar, and I'm not a hard science or engineering major, so I'll need about 20 more credits than I currently have in hard sciences/engineering/CS in order to qualify. It's my understanding that the Python course probably wouldn't count toward those credits.

So, which course should I take? Thanks for any help!

Building website for math students, first-time programmer, need some guidance.

brighteyes7 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:28:57 -0800

Building website for math students, first-time programmer, need guidance. I posted here a month ago regarding learning programming after an MA in Math.

I finished Think Python in about a month and wrote code to solve virtually all the exercises (good exercises), but accidentally sudo rm'ed them from the Unix shell, so I lost all but three or four programs. I'm still disappointed about this, but I still have code where I programmed a game of N-player tag, and simulated (Monte Carlo) probabilities of various Poker hands, correct to .001.

Right now I'm halfway through a 600-page book on Java (Schildt's intro book; exercises are dull).

I finally have an idea of a real project for myself, as opposed to these toy exercises.

I'd like to build a website for my (college) math students with games and tests to incentivize and improve their performance. It'd be private (they'd have to log in with a password), they'd select their own avatar and name, their scores and performance will be recorded, and they'll compete against one another in various ways. It'll be entertaining and fun, with a nice GUI. I'd like to get a shell up before I start making the interface fancy, but I'm mildly ambitious about the end product. It'd also be a general "course webpage", with accessible private information such as grades, as well as public announcements such as course policies and announcements.

I think this could go somewhere, but I've never done this before. What should I know and study besides Java and Python with an eye towards this project? Is it too early in my development, am I moving too fast, etc.?

from making books to making websites

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:17:45 -0800

Looking for a path to front-end web development as a career I work in book publishing as a production editor/copyeditor/project manager-type person. I'm feeling burned out and in need of new challenges, and I'm thinking of re-training myself as a front-end web developer.

I taught myself HTML and CSS for ebook production, and I find that I really enjoy structuring documents and doing markup. I've also dabbled in a couple of programming classes over the years and had an aptitude for it, although I never really did anything useful with it. I can imagine how my skillset would be useful in a web environment, but I need to bone up on some current, in-demand tech skills to get in the door of a new industry. Ultimately I'd be interested in exploring content strategy, information architecture, UX design, but I suspect that I need to put in some time on the basics first.

I figure I need Javascript, and to get a personal site or two up as portfolio pieces. What else should I have in my pocket to take me from "no relevant experience" to "worth the trouble to train"? Python? PHP? Drupal? Ruby on Rails? Is actual coursework necessary, or is learning on my own just as good? Assuming I really focus on this, and work on it solidly in my spare time, I'd like to get up and running within 6-9 months.

A couple of caveats: I don't want to be a web project manager. Owning the schedule and coordinating everything is probably my least favorite part of my job. I'd rather do the work than give someone else a deadline to do the work. I have a good eye for design, but I'm not visually creative enough (nor skilled enough with Photoshop) to be a web designer. We'd like to move to a smaller market area, where I'm guessing the available jobs will be more generalist in nature, so nothing too specialized or esoteric. I also have schemes of starting up my own thing, but for now I'd like to be in a position to be hired by someone else, ideally a startup or agency with good quality-of-work-life, nothing corporate or sketchy.

I'm especially interested in enabling technologies that help put it all together -- like git, for example -- but that I might not have heard of as someone who doesn't do this stuff for a living (yet!).

Standing on the shoulders of giants

prunes — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:06:32 -0800

I'm looking for a list of the best (however you define it) third-party Python libraries. E.g. Django, Beautiful Soup, PIL, etc. I'm a novice Python programmer. I've worked a little bit with Django and Beautiful Soup and have found both to be great tools. I'm wondering what else might be out there that I don't know about.

Advice on converting a python program to a web app?

conrad101 — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 05:04:03 -0800

Hi I have programmed on eclipse, a reasonably straightforward program in Python 2.7 that applies image filters to user selected images e.g. by turning them to sepia, black & white, negative, etc. It uses Tkinter for the graphics user interface and the program functions ok. However, I was thinking about how to turn this into a web app. So to transfer this to an Amazon cloud server, I understand that for the client side user interface I would need to convert the program by adding html and javascript to the client side while python handles the server side? Does anyone know of any tutorials or other resources that are particularly good at covering web apps like this using python, html and javascript?

IDLE hands and the hacker's workshop

bleary — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 18:56:48 -0800

Please help me have some semi structured way to help people who show up to python office hours without any clear direction. I am a member of a hackerspace in Chicago and someone started twice a month informal "office hours" for python. I think this is a kick-ass idea and I really like helping people so I've been going to them. Some friends and I recently put on a beginning python workshop, and I'm hoping that as we have more of these, more people will show up to python office hours and get excited about programming and working on projects.

The problem is that sometimes people show up and don't have questions, but want to learn something. I think perhaps I could have some exercises to hand to them or something slightly structured for them to do.

Last week we had two new people. We asked about their interests (wearable computing, assistive technologies) and that helped to get things rolling a little. I'd like to do even better.

I just started a wiki page and it sucks right now. Suggest changes. I'd really like to have a potential pool of projects for people to stand up and try out if they don't have anything to work on. I think working on things is better than watching lectures. I don't have a section of the wiki like that yet. I know some people locally who work on open source projects, so I might highlight a few things that local people work on?

Here is the current text from it:

Python Office Hours

Every first and third Thursday of each month at 7pm PS:One holds Python Office Hours. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skill level!

This is a chance for people learning to program in Python to get together for moral support, project assistance, and homework assistance. We’ll have an experienced python developer or two on hand to help answer questions and explain difficult concepts. This is an “office hours” event with volunteer teaching assistants. The expectation is that students watch lectures, read tutorials and attempt homework on their own, then use this as a resource to aid in learning.

If you don't already have something to work on, look through the resources below for something to try.

Projects

Contributing to Libre software projects

Exercises

http://codingbat.com/python
http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
http://projecteuler.net/

Tutorials & Books

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html
http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python
http://www.learnpython.org/
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
http://www.diveintopython.net/

Online courses and lectures

Software Carpentry
Computer Science 101
Google's Python Class
Introduction to Computer Science (cs101) Building a Search Engine
MIT Open Course Ware Introduction to Computer Science and Programming

RStudio equivalent for Python

Jimbob — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 19:44:16 -0800

What is the closest equivalent to RStudio for Python? I love RStudio - the integrated help files, integrated package searching and downloading, the extra little features like Knitr and RMarkdown, and Git integration. I've pretty much given up on Python and have been using R for years now, because I could never find an IDE for Python that did all the things I wanted.

So what's the closest thing to RStudio for Python development? In particular, I want something with integrated help, auto-complete for functions and arguments, the ability to browse, download and install Python libraries from a central repository, and the ability to manage "projects", with a collection of associated files in a directory

Browser based programming environment?

jsturgill — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:41:45 -0800

I want to set up a browser-based programming environment for my projects that I can access from the web whenever I'm not at home. I don't want it to rely on any files or programs other than IE/Firefox/Safari/Chrome--no plugins or anything that might require admin permissions.

Is Orion the clear way to go? What other browser based programming environments exist?

Looking mainly for two things: syntax highlighting (python, jinja, javascript, css, html, xml, json, php) and git integration. If those bases get covered, I doubt I'll have any complaints.

Making mountains out of molehills and rockin' some mo' skills/Butt naked beats with butt naked fills

Seiten Taisei — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 10:04:48 -0800

How do I design a personal website/web portfolio that will dazzle, amaze, or at least intrigue everyone from professional web developers to non-technical senior level types outside the field and convince them that I do indeed, have the skills to pay the bills. Relevant History: I've got something like 40-60% of a degree in Software Engineering, depending on how you look at it. Haven't held a proper job since 2009 and thus no good references, unless I get friends to lie for me. I dream of going back to school but now, I need some actual (read: well paid) work and my best qualifications can be implied from my history with the formula:

my history → programming V web development V ¬design
So far the few web firms I interviewed with didn't seem to mind my spotty history or lack of references, but were more interested in code samples or actual work I had done, and the only thing I could show them was a rather generic Joomla website I worked on years ago, which wasn't impressive. One of them mentioned personal projects, which is where I got the idea. My other professional contacts outside the field have also expressed interest in seeing a portfolio of sorts and have made mentions on possibly offering me work.

I already own a domain in the form of firstnamelastname.net and to get around the costs of hosting since I don't plan on getting many hits, I've decided to do the entire thing on Google App Engine* using either Python/Django or some combination of Java + framework or some JVM compatible language (I like Clojure because I are dork) and a few static HTML pages, with the all the code on github for bonus points.

Now for the actual question: what the hell do I put on my website? I haven't really done much programming in a while and am just brushing up on my skills with some Project Euler stuff and redoing old Comp Sci assignments in new languages. I guess I could link to a few of those, plus my current resume and contact details, but otherwise I'm stuck for actual content. Also my design skills are somewhat sketchy (hurr!) and beyond putting up my name in a big, well kerned, web friendly typeface on professional white background on the frontpage, I've got nothing. I've thought of a few flashy impressive things like backgrounds that change with the weather, some Easter eggs like a mini tetris game when you press 't' ala utorrent, etc. But I'm not sure on these.

To be honest, I don't care about flashiness as such, but would like to make something that is both visually pleasing and contains concrete examples of my skills. Basically what I want is something that any person in a hiring or business capacity can look at and be satisfied that I either match the skills they're looking for or at least am versatile enough to quickly learn.

Any other input appreciated and so on.

*GAE or Heroku? Any thoughts?
**Is using a ton of HTML5 + CSS3 a good idea? Has the world adapted?