Python December 2006 Archive

Copyright NASA, Lewis Research Center. Recently, Angela Bradley, About's Guide to PHP, noted that the first "Hello, World!" program in a tutorial dates back to a 1973 tutorial that Brian Kernighan ... Read More

Polyglot Python, based on the work of stylesr1 at Stock XChange (Photo #586141); edited by A Lukaszewski. New image copyright 2006 by A Lukaszewski. Used with permission. If you live on ... Read More

Christmas is imminent, and this year's holiday season will soon draw to a close. With it will go my "Merry Christmas!" tutorial (at least until next year). If ... Read More

Sun is known for coining the phrase "The computer is the network." The day of coding for the stand-alone, local machine is pretty much gone. Any program that ... Read More

Debugging is one of the more tedious parts of any development process. No matter how well you code, there will almost always be unexpected dynamics that only come to ... Read More

A fully functional program does what it is supposed to do and crashes gracefully when it doesn't. For this reason, error handling is a key component of any program that ... Read More

As you doubtless know, Python comes with its own integrated development environment (IDE). It is called IDLE, short for Integrated DeveLopment Environment. While it has always had a ... Read More

As you probably know, the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum works for Google. Google uses Python for its search engine quality, and half of Guido's work-week is spent ... Read More

If you have ever tried to import the regex module or similar older code, you will know that Python has a robust system of warnings. These warnings help you ... Read More

Image courtesy of stock.xchg, No.649498. Anyone who programs Python (or any other language) long enough learns that data is not always consistent and that errors happen. But your programs can handle ... Read More

Image courtesy of Trine Florie, stock.xchg, No.655639. After yesterday's entry about OpenOffice.org, I should mention that there are many more applications that are able to be automated with Python. Here is ... Read More

Microsoft has recently posted a new security advisory about a MS-Word virus and recommends as follows: Do not open or save Word files that you receive from un-trusted or that are ... Read More

According to the TIOBE Index for December, Python continues to gain in popularity. Python remains the best general purpose language around, surpassing the lower level languages in terms ... Read More

I have recently posted my review of Magnus Lie Hetland's Beginning Python. As I mentioned previously, it is an excellent resource for the beginner and the intermediate programmer alike. Whereas ... Read More

As part of my ongoing series on building an RSS Reader in Python, I have recently created a repository of the source code used in making the application. ... Read More

I wrote recently in this space that I am reading Magnus Lie Hetland's Beginning Python for review. That should be coming this week. Another book I am reviewing ... Read More

With the advent of the holiday season, I have substituted a new Python tutorial for "Hello, World!" in my list of Essentials (upper left). The new tutorial offers the ... Read More