Finally we’ve finished the Python Beginners über-series in our Club. In total the Club has 118 videos over 15 series all focused on teaching new Python skills. Now we’re done with Python beginners we’ll be expanding our scope.
In just under 30 minutes in the File I/O Tutorial I cover reading text files, writing textfiles, using binary files (with Python Imaging Library as the example) and persisting data with the pickle module.
Now that we’re finished with the raw episodes and our Learning Paths are usable I’m tying together all the Python videos (free+Club) into paths-of-learning that teach you about topics including:
Starting to Program with Python
Getting Python Installed
Walking through fully-written programs (long step-by-step series)
Python development environments and tools
Python GUI development
Django
Web-application development
The learning-paths, and learning how to use them effectively, are very much a work in progress. As ever we welcome any and all constructive feedback.
Once we’re done with the Python learning paths we’ll start to tie together all the other topics in ShowMeDo (heck - we have well over 1000 screencast tutorials now!) to make learning much easier.
Finally we’ve finished the Python Beginners über-series in our Club. In total the Club has 118 videos over 15 series all focused on teaching new Python skills. Now we’re done with Python beginners we’ll be expanding our scope.
In just under 30 minutes in the File I/O Tutorial I cover reading text files, writing textfiles, using binary files (with Python Imaging Library as the example) and persisting data with the pickle module.
Now that we’re finished with the raw episodes and our Learning Paths code is finished (it is hidden still…but not for much longer), I’ll now be tieing together all the Python videos (free+Club) into paths-of-learning that teach you about topics including:
Starting to Program with Python
Getting Python Installed
Walking through fully-written programs (long step-by-step series)
Python development environments and tools
Python GUI development
Django
Web-application development
Once we’re done with the Python learning paths we’ll start to tie together all the other topics in ShowMeDo (heck - we have over 1000 screencast tutorials now!) to make learning much easier.
We may not know much about the future of computer programming, but one thing we do know is that it is parallel and the biggest challenge facing software programmers and hardware designers is how to exploit all those multiple cores out there.
So Unpingco’s new Python series is both fascinating and prescient. Oh and useful too.
The chief impediment to widespread usage of parallel computing is the difficulty in programming HPCs. Furthermore, most users work from a Windows PC so that learning UNIX as a prerequisite to parallel programming is a further obstruction. What is needed is a smooth workflow that simplifies both the programming task and the remote execution management. VISION/HPC is a Python-based, drag-and-drop visual-programming environment that reduces sophisticated programming tasks to dropping and connecting icons in a GUI flowchart…
Rede’s wondeful series shows how to repair old photographs with the GIMP graphic-editor. Check it out even if you haven’t got any old photographs to repair - you’ll learn a whole lot of GIMP anyway. And the photos are lovely too
Yiroel’s huge C++ beginners set continues to grow. This is a fantastic resource for starting programmers in what is a notoriously tricky language. Compared to a scripting language like Python, C++ makes much greater demands on the programmer, with a much more complex syntax and work-flow. So if you could do with a bit of assistence, check out these vids and leave some useful comments
Do you want to learn OpenOffice Writer? OOo Writer is the open-source world’s answer to Microsoft Word - it is pretty much feature compatible in every respect, it works the same way and you can edit and share .doc files just as if you were using Word. You can even open older .doc files that Word itself has trouble working with!
This series is part of our Club, you’ll need to buy membership to get full access but the first two episodes are free. The Club contains over 10 hours of extra videos, mostly focused right now on teaching you Python Programming. More OpenOffice videos will follow.
We have a Learning Path for OpenOffice tutorials, you’ll find them here. This Path will take you through all of our tutorials for OOo (both free and Club).
We cover the history of how we started ShowMeDo with Python screencasts, Kyran’s innovative Learning Paths (which caught MIT’s eye), the special learn-Python-quickly tutorials in our Club, our authors and the 1,000 educational screencasts we’ve built between us to date.
We also discuss how you can share your own knowledge with 100,000 global viewers and end with a light chat about Python 3.0.
Ron has a long list of podcast interviews, check them out if you want to know about topics like Django, Python Visualisation and the Python Learning Foundation. He also lists many Python tutorials across the web, they are great short-cuts to find what you need.
Have finally got round to giving the Club videos a bit of presentational structure following Ian’s last file I/O series in his huge Beginner Programming With Python.
Ian’s final series in Beginners brings the club total to 118 videos, 15 video-series and over 10 hours of Pythonic video demonstration <phew>.
Ian’s beginner-sets were conceived as a whole, from introducing the look and feel of Python to covering, in quite a bit of detail, the general Python programming elements. With Lucas Holland’s introduction to the Python standard libraries we have a nice round number of 50 videos, setting clubbers up nicely for the other club videos and some of the intermediate/advanced Showmedo Python series.
Wearing my research-scientist’s hat I can honestly assert that Python’s strength in scientific programming is one of its glories, and maybe less appreciated than it should be. That makes series like unpingo’s Scientific and parallel computing using IPython pure gold for its target audience. Combining the power and flexibility of the enhanced IPython interpreter with some of the industrial strength Python scientific, numeric and graphing libraries creates a superbly flexible and efficient scientific programming set-up. Check out these vids, rather superb as ever.
The series has five videos:
Introducing and setting up IPython on a Windows PC
Getting around and using the IPython interpreter
Using on-line documentation for a short case study on computing integrals
Subclassing and using the Python language for scientific computing
Using doctest and docstrings in customized classes
In just over a minute Ian shows how to install the increasingly necessary firefox adblock plugin. Very slickly done as always. As ever, adblocking is subject to a little debate. The garish, obnoxious ads that destroy ones browsing experience are self-defeating anyway so blocking them isn’t an issue, but more benign, relatively peaceable text-based ads should probably be allowed through if there’s any chance it will help maintain the flow of quality content.
