ShowMeDo Blog

“No need to pass foreign keys in find conditions, just do the find through a has_many association.” - 1 video, 2 minutes, Ryan Bates

“Shorten simple finds considerably and improve readability by using the dynamic find_all_by and find_by methods.” - 1 video, 2 minutes, Ryan Bates

“Learn a quick way to improve performance. Just store the end result of an expensive command in an instance variable!” - 1 video, 2 minutes, Ryan Bates

Welcome to my new 8-part series guiding you through starting with Python. In this series I will cover:

• Getting a Feel for Python (this post)
• Python Development Environments (IDEs)
• Python ‘under the hood’
• GUI Development
• Web development
• Writing solid code with Unit Tests
• Games and Physics
• Python Advocacy

Side note - are you learning Python? We’ve started Club ShowMeDo which is aimed at new and intermediate Python programmers, our specially-crafted screencast tutorials are aimed directly at getting you to learn Python the easy way.

When you start with Python you’ll first need to decide on a distribution and then test that it has installed successfully. Watch the first two episodes in my Python Newbies series to get started. Generally I recommend that you start with the distribution at python.org and customise it afterwards.

To get a feel for just how much support is available in the Python world, see my two-part Introduction to Python Resources on the Web - the videos show you the important Python sites, news aggregators, documentation and tutorials, download sites and (importantly!) how to get into the community.

If you are new to programming then you might want to try André Roberge’s RUR-PLE learning robot. This packages gives you an easy and contained environment to get started with Python programming. We have three videos, the first two are by RUR-PLE’s author and the third is by one of Horst Jen’s students (Chen) at a computer school for Austrian kids.

If you like podcasts then you’ll love Ron Stephens Python411 mp3s. His most recent (11th March 2007) is about Python Advocacy, a recording of Jeff Rush at PyCon and it is well worth a listen. Ron also hosts a growing list of Python tutorials which are very useful especially if you’re serious about learning Python.

You’ll also want to check Nadav Samet’s Python Challenge - a set of web-based puzzles which can be solved by clever thinking and some Python coding. The challenges grow increasingly tricky, the first few are quite simple - the first should just take a few minutes to solve

If you speak German then you’re in for a treat - watch our excellent 9-part (and growing) series by Lucas Holland and Marius Meinert: Einführung in die Programmierung mit Python.

Finally - if you want to know why Kyran and I are growing ShowMeDo then you can watch our presentation to PyCon 2007 recorded just a month ago.

For written resources I strongly recommend the printed Beginning Python (Hetland) and on-line both the free Dive into Python and Swaroop’s Byte of Python.

If you have questions or you need guidance then leave me a comment or drop me a question in our forum.

Join me for the second entry in a few days when I discuss Python IDEs.

Here are some comments from the 3rd and 9th videos in my Python Newbies series. Using IDLE v1.2:

“This IDLE session is great. It really highlighted this simple to start yet powerful free IDE. A built-in IDE, in my point of view, is one of many reasons Python is getting more popular. I started to like Python and this series by Ian more…”, miracle

“Before watching the video, I was under the impression that IDLE was nothing more than a fancy syntax highlighting editor but here Ian shows you how useful IDLE really is when you start learning Python.

Though I use PyDev for my daily work, I do go to the Python shell to just try out a few things on the interpreter before writing my main code but I never used IDLE for it, I always preferred command line. But Ian just shows you that IDLE is more than a syntax highlighting interpreter and he demonstrates a lot of it’s feature like repeating the code (by hitting return), Alt + ‘/’ (which shows code complete), and Ctrl + C (Key-board interrupt), etc.

He also points you to some good references to IDLE tutorials which will be very useful when you are beginning to learn Python.

Keep going Ian Looking for more videos from you here on ShowMeDo.”, Srikanth

“A very good video, explaining both Python and IDLE editing basics. I learned a lot from this. Both on the Python language and library (for which IDLE already shows plenty of tooltips), but even more on the editing shortcuts.”, Frank van Puffelen

Bonus - IDLE’s Python Help and an Exercise:

“I thought this was a very good SMD. I used it to compare the help functions within IPython, and was inspired to add a permanent alias to evoke the Python help file (like F1 in IDLE)”, Jerol Harrington

“I enjoyed this video. It is informative and useful.”, Jack Palmer

“In dieser Episode beginnen wir, uns mit der Manipulation des Kontrollflusses von Programmen auseinanderzusetzen.” - 1 video, 11 minutes, Lucas Holland and Marius Meinert

Jshack pointed me at Jeff Rush’s talk, recorded by Ron Stevens (Python411), entitled Python Advocacy: March 11, 2007 (mp3 - 17mb 40 minutes). Jeff talks kindly about ShowMeDo and Python411 as ‘very valuable resources’ (around the 15 minute mark).

I also heard about the new advocacy.python.org site and that Python Papers have just released their second issue.

Here’s a nice (guesstimated) fact - there are probably 1-1.5 million Python programmers in the world. Woot!

“This series aims to get you up and running with Python 2.5 on Windows XP. Here I have distilled for you the knowledge that I wanted when I first started with Python. During 107 minutes of video I’ll get you up and running with the right Python distro, coding in a choice of IDE, debugging and writing solid unit-tested code.

Three of the episodes cover writing code with PyDev, two with IDLE and the series includes three exercises to help you practice. By the end you will be ready to start coding your own Python projects.

Note that this is not a language tutorial - let me know if you’d like to see an introduction to the Python language?”, 9 videos, 1 hour 47 minutes, Ian Ozsvald

This is ShowMeDo’s first commercial series - only the first 2 videos are free. The entire series costs £5 UK (approximately $10 US, 8 Euro) - that is a *lot* of tutorial content for a very small fee.

Episodes:
* Deciding on a Python 2.5 Distro (4 minutes)
* Running Python 2.5 on Windows XP (5 minutes)
* Using IDLE v1.2 (21 minutes)
* IDLE’s Python Help and an Exercise (7 minutes)
* Python at the command line (11 minutes)
* Starting a Python project with PyDev (8 minutes)
* Build a simple file-reader using PyDev (10 minutes)
* Interactive debugging using PyDev (17 minutes)
* Unit Tests for Dependable Code (24 minutes)

Sorry for the downtime, we were promoted to the front-page of Del.icio.us and the ensuing traffic-flood flattened ShowMeDo for 2 hours.  We shall work to improve the site so a future flood isn’t a problem.

The site is running just fine again now.

Thanks to njharman for Python, 3d & Physics with Vpython [ShowMeDo] at Reddit (currently 27 points) and to bonlebon for ShowMeDo, Learn Python, Java and Blender, all in one place at DZone (currently +9 votes).

We’d certainly appreciate you voting for us if you’d like to help spread the word