Archive for May, 2007
Discount for Python Newbies tutorial videos ending in 1 week
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007At the end of May I will end the discounted period for my Python Newbies (on XP) video series. The aim of the series is to distil 4 years of my knowledge about getting-started-with-Python to the viewer in a touch under 2 hours through 9 tutorial videos.
The series has been very well received and I have had some wonderful feedback including:
“As I Ian says [], he’s found, organized, and presented information that would take weeks or months to learn in the ordinary way. Even if your time is worth only $10 per hour, I figure the value in time saved is at least $800. The skills are priceless” - Vincent DiCarlo
Vincent went on to buy a second copy for his nephew after leaving this comment. Until the end of May the entire series costs just £5 (approx. $9 US, 8 Euro). This includes:
- The option of leaving questions for me through the Comments on each video page
- A donation from us to the Python Software Foundation
- The option to download each video for personal backup
- The option of a full refund (within 30 days) for whatever reason
After May the price will rise. Buy access here - it takes just a few minutes - we use Lulu.com to handle PayPal/Credit Card payments, they give you an access URL, the URL grants your login access to the videos.
I am now working on my second series entitled ‘Introductory Python - the easyGUI and csv modules’. I have plans for two more series soon - ‘Debugging with Python’, ‘Writing reliable code with Python’. Each series is aimed at a new Python programmer who has prior coding experience in another language.
New ShowMeDo: (RSS-)Feeds
Saturday, May 19th, 2007“In this episode we guide you through the configuration progress of a rss account and show you how to subscribe to feeds.” - video here, Lucas Holland,Marius Meinert
New ShowMeDo: Mails
Saturday, May 19th, 2007“In this episode we’ll cover, how to set up a mail account and how to get and write mails.” - video here, Lucas Holland,Marius Meinert
New ShowMeDo: Installation and Profiles
Saturday, May 19th, 2007“This first episode is about downloading and installing Thunderbird. After that we cover the profile principle, that Thunderbird has. This allows us, to use one mail account with different thunderbirds.” - video here, Lucas Holland,Marius Meinert
Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) with Python
Friday, May 18th, 2007Johm Montgomery (ShowMeDo author) has started a very nice blog series on Solving the classic Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) with Python.
So far there are 3 posts in the series:
- Tackling the travelling salesman problem: prologue - gives some background on John’s plans
- Tackling the travelling salesman problem: introduction - defines the TSP and ‘NP-Hard’-ness, discusses how to represent the problem in Python and looks at some of the evolutionary-programming tools that will be used in the solution
- Tackling the travelling salesman problem: hill-climbing - John introduces the concept of a ‘fitness landscape’, how a hill-climbing algorithm can traverse the landscape and how to write the hill-climber with Python
John is using a combination of Python code, explanation and graphics to show everything you need for this fascinating topic. Don’t forget to leave John a comment on his blog to let him know what you think.
To learn more about Python you can visit ShowMeDo’s list of Python videos which contains 94 Python tutorials including almost 2-hours worth of tuition in the Python Newbies on XP series.
New ShowMeDo: Pretty Page Title
Thursday, May 17th, 2007_
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“If you are like me, you avoid creating page titles because it is kind of a pain. But in this episode I will show you a clean way to add titles to your pages.” - video here, Ryan Bates
New ShowMeDo: group_by Month
Thursday, May 17th, 2007“Learn how to use the very useful group_by method to group an array by anything you want! In this episode I group an array of tasks by month then sort it properly.” - video here, Ryan Bates
New ShowMeDo: in_groups_of
Thursday, May 17th, 2007“Have you ever wanted to visually line up items in rows and columns? The in_groups_of method makes this a cinch. Just watch out for the gotcha.” - video here, Ryan Bates
New ShowMeDo: Cross Site Scripting
Thursday, May 17th, 2007“Another common security issue is cross site scripting. In this episode you will see why it is so important to escape any HTML a user may submit.” - video here, Ryan Bates
