This week Dave Phillips looks at audio loopers designed for live performance. more>>

From Thursday, March 4, 2010 Washington DC Express print edition:

Megan Fox Thinks She's Linux...Or Something Megan Fox has slept with only two men...."My body parts are all I have left now that are only mine -- the world owns everything else." more>>

Now that's a spectacular failure:

Don't get me wrong: I love firebug. I think it's a great tool for webdevelopers, sysadmins and curious people alike. It's just that... how am I supposed to read those release notes *while I'm starting my browser*?!

Carlie: What is it that you do for Linux Journal?

Shawn: That's a scary question for your boss to ask... :)

Carlie: I meant "Tell our readers what you do for Linux Journal". :p more>>

We're collecting this data to run in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal. We encourage you to leave comments here letting us know why you use the Linux distribution you do. Let your voice be heard! Heads up: we may print your comment in the magazine (if you don't want your comment printed, please let us know that within the comment itself). Arch Linux CentOS Debian Fedora Gentoo Mandriva MEPIS Novell/SuSE PCLinuxOS Red Hat Slackware Ubuntu (any flavor, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.) Yellow Dog Linux Puppy Linux Linux Mint Other (let us know with a comment)

Among the important benefits of Linux's permission hierarchy is its ability to keep untrusted users from running amok. The all-or-nothing nature of root access, however, can present headaches when users are trusted, but only so far. That is a problem the sudo utility attempts to solve, and does so fairly well — except for the occasional glitch. more>>

Download .ogv format

ConFoo brings several experts in town and we take this opportunity to launch two sprints: one on TurboGears with Chris Perkins on 2010-03-13 starting at 10h30 am and one on Distribute with Tarek Ziadé on 2010-03-15 starting at 6 pm. Both sprints will be at Brasseurs Numériques’ office, 1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11.

The TurboGears sprint will focus on polishing the code base and the documentation for the upcoming 2.1 release. Some work on the Sprox from generator and on the C5T CMS is also very likely. Anyone somewhat familiar with Pylons should be able to contribute.

The Distribute sprint will focus on implementing the newly accepted PEPs: 345, Metadata; and 386, version schemas. Anyone who’ve used Setuptools to some exetent should be able to contribute.

Bring your laptop or make a pairing agreement on with someone else. As usual, capacity is limited to 12 sprinters so please sign up on the mailing list.

J'ai décidé de mettre un peu plus de contenu sur ma page d'accueil, question de rendre ça un peu plus gai. J'utilise Google Reader depuis quelques semaines et j'essaie de bien classer mes découvertes sauf que je ne peux pas faire ça tous les jours. Ce que je vous propose sur ma page d'accueil c'est un échantillon de ce que je star, c'est à dire des trucs que je vais lire plus tard et classer. Voilà la version brute.

Linux Journal Insider - April 2010 by Linux Journal

Linux Journal Insider is your monthly peek at what to expect from the new issue of Linux Journal, before it even hits the newsstands. This month we discuss software development! Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin give you the inside scoop on topics, articles, and geekery in general. more>>

The BBC's iPlayer has long been a thorn in the side of the Open Source community. Since it entered public beta in mid-2007, the BBC has consistently flip-flopped between completely ignoring FOSS users, serving them third-rate pacifier versions, and begrudgingly granting access to what Windows users have had all along. And the flipping continues. more>>

One of the least understood features of OpenOffice.org is graphics text. People understand vaguely that it differs from regular text, but exactly how it differs or why anyone should care is mostly unknown. However, if you know the distinction, graphics text can work for you in ways that regular text cannot. more>>

It might come as a surprise that terms like Linux and Open Source and epithets like bloody Microsoft and it shouldn’t be this hard are fairly common in my household. And not always spoken by me! more>>

Nothing to see now. Rien à voir maintenant.

So here I am, on a sunday night playing with various open source projects instead of having a proper non-geek life like I'm apparently supposed to be doing in our modern society.

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I tried upgrading this blog to Drupal 7 today during the Koumbit/Montreal D7 code sprint today, which lead me to work on the D6 to D7 upgrade path and submit two patches that fixed update.php enough so I got through the upgrade. The results aren't as satisfying as they could (the site is basically broken) but at least it bootstraps. :)

The second Django sprint was another clear success. It was a pleasant surprise to have so many volunteer and we filled the Brasseurs Numériques’ office at capacity with 12 sprinters.

Thanks to Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie for sponsoring the event and a very special thank to all the sprinters:

• Davin Baragiotta
• Benoit Caron
• Stéphane Duchesneau
• Alexandre Forget
• Yannick Gingras
• Ali Jetha
• Collin Lavoie
• Martin Paquette
• Cyril Robert
• Francois Savard
• Jean Schurger
• Alexandre Vassalotti

We will try to have another translation sprint toward the end of March.

Sunday is officially the last day to register for ConFoo at the current price.

Actually, that not quite exact because as a way to thank you for reading this blog, we offer you $100 of rebate. Simply follow this link to register at the community rate: http://confoo.ca/pymontreal

You probably recall that Chris Perkins is giving a one-day training session on Web development with Python and Turbogears. You get an additional $100 of rebate if you attend to both the training and the conference. Having seen Chris in the tutorials at PyCon, I can’t put enough emphasis on how good a teacher he is. This is a very unique opportunity to get high quality training on Web development with Python right here in Montréal.

Learning Python is a well-written book by an experienced Python trainer that has served the Python community well since the first edition was published, back in 1999. Now at its fourth edition, this book by Mark Lutz arguably continues to be Python’s bible. This article reviews the fourth edition by discussing the target audience, scope, content, and pedagogical features. It concludes by a recommendation.

Audience

This book is intended as an introductory text to programmers new to Python.  Although people with no programming experience are not discouraged from reading it, they are warned that time is mostly spent teaching Python, not programming fundamentals. I agree with this picture, though from my own experience as well as those of others, the book is equally valuable to more experienced Python programmers both as a pseudo-reference, and as an introduction to more advanced topics. The critical point here is that the book does not make assumptions about educational or vocational experiences and provides many examples, which renders the book approachable by a large audience.

Scope

Both Python 2.6 and 3.x are covered in this edition. However, the latest 3.x line is considered the reference from which variations in 2.6 are discussed when appropriate. This approach is logical; the new Python 3.x presents a major change to the language, but is not sufficiently dominant to warrant exclusive treatment.

This book discusses the Python language and excludes the Python standard and non-standard libraries. The latter are discussed in other places, including Lutz’s own Programming Python, which stands at its third edition at the time of writing of this article. I find this separation necessary because of size considerations and, in fact, this division did not exist in the first edition of the book! However, one topic does not seem to fit in the language/libraries division, and that is packaging and deployment.

I will argue that there aren’t many (if any) books that discuss packaging and deployment of Python programs. I will also argue that this topic should be included in the book being reviewed here since it is essential to real Python programming. Since Lutz discusses the Python run-time environment, I do not think it would detract from the book’s coherence to include a single chapter on packaging.  It is possible that the proliferation of various packaging and deployment options such as distutils, setuptools, pip, buildout, virtualenv, paver, fabric and others, is the reason for this exclusion. Or it could be that these tools are in a state of major flux that any text will be quickly outdated.  If size is the reason for this exclusion, maybe Lutz or someone else can publish a “Packaging and Deploying Python” as a separate volume.

Content

The book starts by making a case for the use of Python. Both the features of the language and its prominent users are discussed to build credibility. Then, the run-time environment is discussed: how to run programs in various ways on various operating systems and language interpreters.

Types and statements, which are at the core of any language, are discussed next. Notably, there is an excellent discussion on the topic of iterators and generators (both are also covered in a later chapter).  Functions, modules and classes are then introduced. The text also includes a discussion of general object-oriented programming (OOP) principles which I find to be invaluable, as it brings the topic of classes to life.

Exceptions are introduced and discussed in detail. The placement here is appropriate since exceptions are now objects in Python so classes had to be discussed first. This chapter should prove to be especially useful for people migrating from other languages that do not have simple, yet effective, exception-handling constructs.

Finally, four advanced topics are covered: decorators, unicode, managed attributes, and meta-classes. I find the first two to be absolutely necessary for almost any system nowadays, even the smaller ones! The latter two are not as ubiquitous, but should be useful to more experienced programmers.

I should mention here that the discussion of the topics mentioned above doesn’t stop at the basics, but provides comprehensive coverage. This is also the case with the discussion of topics such as dynamic typing, inheritance order, iterators, generators, comprehensions, and functional programming, among many others. There is even an interlude on documentation and the pydoc library.

Pedagogical Features

Like many programming texts, Learning Python uses small programming examples (appropriately executed in the Python interactive shell). These small examples hope to capture the essence of the topic at hand, and it does that well within the limitations of a small-scale context. This fourth edition adds a new chapter on classes (Chapter 27) that contains a more realistic code example presented in a tutorial format.

In addition to examples, each chapter ends with a summary of the chapter’s content as well as a quiz. The quiz is immediately followed by its answers for easy reference. I have to admit that I do not use any of these two features, so I will not be able to comment on their efficacy.

Conclusion

Like many O’Reilly books, this is a well-written, coherent, and beautifully type-set book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to, or already does, program using python. It should help the novice in their transition to an excellent programming language, or otherwise, make an already familiar environment more powerful in the hands of veterans.

About the reviewer: Ahmed Al-Saadi is a Software Analyst who works for a Montreal Python house. He wrote his first lines of code on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+, though unfortunately not in Python at the time.

Vous aurez probablement remarqué que j'ai changé le "look" graphique de ce site. Suite à une mise à jour automatisée (grâce à aegir) de mon blog par l'excellente équipe de Koumbit, il s'est avéré que le thème que j'utilisais auparavant ("Zen classic", un sous-thème de Zen) est maintenant périmé. Qu'à cela ne tienne!

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