Python resources and further learning

[Rohan Prinja]

Hey everyone,

Hope you enjoyed the Python session! I had an awesome time teaching and it felt really great seeing the enthu from so many people, especially those of you who actually skipped dinner (sorry about that, by the way :D )

Okay, so now you must be wondering what to do after this session. Here' s a short list of resources, websites and textbooks that you should definitely look into to delve further into Python:

Books

• Learn Python the hard way - simple, easy to follow book
• Learning Python - huge, bulky book, i suggest you use this as a reference
• Head first Python - very fun, informal, chill book, doesn't go too deep

Websites

• http://docs.python.org/ - the official Python documentation! Read it to get an in-depth understanding of the core Python language.
  
• http://www.codecademy.com/ - someone mentioned this site, and I've heard lots of good things about it
  
• http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ - if you don't feel like paying for Learn Python the Hard Way (or if you're really bad at pirating books :D ) you can read the book online for free, legally!
  

What else can I do?

The sky is the limit! Think of cool things you want to implement, and then start programming. If you run into a problem WnCC junta is very friendly and helpful, and of course there's always Google and StackOverflow :)e

e

--

Rohan Prinja

Third Year, Computer Science

IIT Bombay

[Kartik Sudarshan]

another good link for easy video tutorials is The New Boston
Only problem I feel is they are only basic tutorials.No advanced stuff

[Dilawar Singh]

I personally found that solving a puzzle/problem in Python is a much better way to learn it than writing fragments of code randomly. Implement area under the curve algorithm first using functions and then wrapping them under classes. One can then try to parallelize it (n thread computing area when limit 0 to x is broken into n subdivision). It is quite a good problem for learning concurrency. Of-course one has to go through the basic syntax first. I believe, official tutorial is good enough for this. Or one attend a basic session on python.

If someone is looking at Python for scientific computing and starting from scratch in Python, this is a decent book

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf

--
Dilawar

[Janga Varun]

http://www.pythonchallenge.com This site has interesting riddles!

-Varun

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[Manish Goregaokar]

Some useful modules/frameworks:

Generally useful:

  - sys, os: Can't live without 'em. Usually.

  - time, datetime, math, random, shuffle: What it says on the box. 

  - re: regex handling. Open this can of worms with caution if you are a newbie to regexes  

  - argparse: Beautiful library for handling command line arguments.

  - virtualenv: Lets you create a mini-environment where you can reconfigure python without affecting the base python install and not requiring sudo. Usually not preinstalled. 

  - threading: Concurrency and other voodoo. Use with extreme caution.

Web utilities:

  - json: JSON parsing

  - Flask: Easy-to-use  framework to serve dynamic content. Very good for APIs. Usually not preinstalled. 

  - Django: More complicated web framework, but is good for creating a more robust website (with an in built admin panel, etc). Usually not preinstalled. 

Scraping/web communication:

  - urllib2: Fetching stuff from the web

  - Mechanize: Python lightweight browser-like object. Usually not preinstalled

  - BeautifulSoup: HTML/XML parser. Usually not preinstalled

  - Scrapy: Scraping framework. Usually not preinstalled

Graphics:

  - PyQT4/5: Robust windowing library. Usually not preinstalled.

  - Tkinter: Simple canvas-like library. Usually not preinstalled

  - PIL: All sorts of image manipulation. Usually not preinstalled

-Manish Goregaokar

[Dilawar Singh]

Learn regular expressions.

http://regex101.com/#python

On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 12:43:50 AM UTC+5:30, Rohan Prinja wrote:

[Dilawar]

Fantastic way to create command-line arguments.

         http://docopt.org