Tutorial - Learn Python in 10 minutes - Stavros' Stuff
NOTE: If you would like some Python development done, my company, Stochastic Technologies, is available for consulting. This tutorial is available as a short ebook. The e-book features extra content from follow-up posts on various Python best practices, all in a convenient, self-contained format. Preliminary fluff So, you want to learn the Python programming language but can't find a concise and yet full-featured tutorial. Properties Python is strongly typed (i.e. types are enforced), dynamically, implicitly typed (i.e. you don't have to declare variables), case sensitive (i.e. var and VAR are two different variables) and object-oriented (i.e. everything is an object). Getting help Help in Python is always available right in the interpreter. >>> help(5)Help on int object:(etc etc) >>> dir(5)['__abs__', '__add__', ...] >>> abs. Syntax Python has no mandatory statement termination characters and blocks are specified by indentation. Data types You can access array ranges using a colon (:).
The Python “with” Statement by Example
Python’s with statement was first introduced five years ago, in Python 2.5. It’s handy when you have two related operations which you’d like to execute as a pair, with a block of code in between. The classic example is opening a file, manipulating the file, then closing it: with open('output.txt', 'w') as f: f.write('Hi there!') The above with statement will automatically close the file after the nested block of code. Here’s another example. This code sample uses a Context object (“cairo context”) to draw six rectangles, each with a different rotation. cr.translate(68, 68) for i in xrange(6): cr.save() cr.rotate(2 * math.pi * i / 6) cr.rectangle(-25, -60, 50, 40) cr.stroke() cr.restore() That’s a fairly simple example, but for larger scripts, it can become cumbersome to keep track of which save goes with which restore, and to keep them correctly matched. By themselves, pycairo’s save and restore methods do not support the with statement, so we’ll have to add the support on our own.
Python Tools for Visual Studio
NPR Puzzle: Finding Synonyms with Python and WordNet | Data Dork
This week’s puzzle asks: From Alan Meyer of Newberg, Ore.: Think of a common word that’s six letters long and includes a Q. Change the Q to an N, and rearrange the result to form a new word that’s a synonym of the first one. What are the words? This puzzle is a good opportunity to play with some very cool computational language tools available through the Natural Langauge Toolik (NLTK). NLTK is a group of libraries and functions that contain powerful tools for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP). Before we get to using the NLTK, let’s break down this puzzle into multiple steps. 1. Approach: 1. 2. 3. This is best demonstrated through example and the use of one our language’s most versatile words – shit. So what I’ve done here is started Python in the terminal, and then installed the wordnet module from nltk.corpus. Back to the puzzle at hand, we need to see if any of the words from step 1 and step 2 are synonyms. Full code available here at github here. Like this:
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python - Learn how to program with a free ebook programming tutorial
Chapter 1 Read online: Chapter 1 - Installing Python Videos: Chapter 2 Read online: Chapter 2 - The Interactive Shell Chapter 3 Read online: Chapter 3 - Strings Download source: hello.py Copy source to clipboard: Use the online diff tool to find typos in your code: hello.py Chapter 4 Read online: Chapter 4 - Guess the Number Download source: guess.py Use the online diff tool to find typos in your code: guess.py Chapter 5 Read online: Chapter 5 - Jokes Download source: jokes.py Use the online diff tool to find typos in your code: jokes.py Chapter 6 Read online: Chapter 6 - Dragon Realm Download source: dragon.py Use the online diff tool to find typos in your code: dragon.py Chapter 7 Read online: Chapter 7 - Using the Debugger Chapter 8 Read online: Chapter 8 - Flow Charts Chapter 9 Read online: Chapter 9 - Hangman Download source: hangman.py Use the online diff tool to find typos in your code: hangman.py Chapter 10 Read online: Chapter 10 - Tic Tac Toe Download source: tictactoe.py Chapter 11 Download source: bagels.py
How not to write Python code
Lately I’ve been reading some rather unclean Python code. Maybe this is mainly because the author(s) of the code had no in-depth knowledge of the Python language itself, the ‘platform’ delivered with cPython,… Here’s a list of some of the mistakes you should really try to avoid when writing Python code: Some days ago RealNitro pointed me at this list of essential Python readings. “Idiomatic Python” is a must-read, even for experienced Python developers. That’s about it for now, maybe I’ll add some more items to this list later on. Posted in Development, Technology. Tagged with Development, python. By Nicolas – February 8, 2008
Learning Python Programming Language Through Video Lectures
One of the upcoming projects I am doing (I will reveal it in one of the next blog posts.) is going to be written entirely in Python. I have a good understanding of Python but, same as I had with JavaScript, I have little experience doing projects from the ground up in it. Update: the project was redditriver.com, read designing redditriver.com (includes full source code). Before diving into the project I decided to take a look at a few Python video lectures to learn language idioms and features which I might have not heard of. Finding Python video lectures was pretty easy as I run a free video lecture blog. First Python Lecture: Python for Programmers Interesting moments in the lecture: [07:15] There are several Python implementations - CPython, PyPy, IronPython and Jython. Okay, this talk was a very basic talk and it really was an introduction for someone who never worked in Python. Second Python Lecture: Advanced Python or Understanding Python Question and answer session: PS.
Book
Natural Language Processing with Python – Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper This version of the NLTK book is updated for Python 3 and NLTK 3. 0. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Bibliography Term Index This book is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No-Derivative-Works 3.0 US License.
PEP 8 -- Style Guide for Python Code
Code should be written in a way that does not disadvantage other implementations of Python (PyPy, Jython, IronPython, Cython, Psyco, and such).For example, do not rely on CPython's efficient implementation of in-place string concatenation for statements in the form a += b or a = a + b. This optimization is fragile even in CPython (it only works for some types) and isn't present at all in implementations that don't use refcounting. In performance sensitive parts of the library, the ''.join() form should be used instead.
Text Processing in Python (a book)
A couple of you make donations each month (out of about a thousand of you reading the text each week). Tragedy of the commons and all that... but if some more of you would donate a few bucks, that would be great support of the author. In a community spirit (and with permission of my publisher), I am making my book available to the Python community. Minor corrections can be made to later printings, and at the least errata noted on this website. A few caveats: (1) This stuff is copyrighted by AW (except the code samples which are released to the public domain).
