[This post has been translocated from my python blog to this blog, as I'm planning to close down my python blog.. It's not seeing much attention from me anyways :D ]
Hm.. Now where do I learn python from.
Well, I started with the book "A Byte of Python" [pdf]. This book is a concise and succinct tutorial for someone who has a background in some or other programming language. I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to learn python, and you can learn from this book in under two weeks even at a relaxed pace of learning.
Likewise, the book "Dive into Python" also seems to be a good resource. I must admit I haven't dived into the book much to make a more accurate comment.
The python official website can be found at http://www.python.org . You can download the version of python for your particular operating system. Python is free !
You will also find Python documentation available for download at the site. [http://www.python.org/doc/] There's one particular tutorial in this documentation [online copy @ http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html]. The tutorial is very exhaustive and will make you pretty much the guru of Python. However, on the flip side, I found the tutorial a little too involved. If you can bolster the patience to pore through it, there's nothing like it.
Have fun charming the python !
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
The Python programming language
[This post has been translocated from my python blog to this blog, as I'm planning to close down my python blog.. It's not seeing much attention from me anyways :D ]
Python was a buzzword around that time. Like an intelligent babe, this language was being exalted as simple and yet tremendously powerful. Well I never bothered; but instead just cleaved to the faith that the prodigious C++ was _the_ panacea for all programming imbroglio.
That went on until I stumbled upon this book: 'Byte of Python' by Swaroop C H [http://www.byteofpython.info/]
And that day, I was bitten.
Well, my old buddy C++ is still my best buddy because she is the most adaptable and reliable programming language that I've learned. In fact C++ and her object oriented lineage teaches you to think of programming situations from an entirely different perspective than what used to be conventional. C++ made you think more like you normally would.
But then Python too borrows heavily from the same Object oriented approaches and additionally allows you the flexibility of more expressive expressions and concise statements. Also somewhere in her lineage python had some functional programming ancestry which allows scope for expressing certain situations more flexibly.
So.. What exactly is this python?
Well I'd qualify python by the following salient features
- It's an interpreted programming language.
- It's a language which uses type inference and dynamic typing, which means you needn't specify the type of variables at compile time, and variables can be assigned values of different types without having to worry too much about the risks involved.
- It's an object oriented programming language.
- Seasoned with condiments from functional programming, it delivers that flexibility too, without the concomitant obscurity associated with functional languages.
- It has a _huge_ standard library base catering to almost all conceivable requirements.
- It is concise and succinct, reducing code size to probably 30% of the C++ analogue.
On the whole, it's one hell of a language.
Python was a buzzword around that time. Like an intelligent babe, this language was being exalted as simple and yet tremendously powerful. Well I never bothered; but instead just cleaved to the faith that the prodigious C++ was _the_ panacea for all programming imbroglio.
That went on until I stumbled upon this book: 'Byte of Python' by Swaroop C H [http://www.byteofpython.info/]
And that day, I was bitten.
Well, my old buddy C++ is still my best buddy because she is the most adaptable and reliable programming language that I've learned. In fact C++ and her object oriented lineage teaches you to think of programming situations from an entirely different perspective than what used to be conventional. C++ made you think more like you normally would.
But then Python too borrows heavily from the same Object oriented approaches and additionally allows you the flexibility of more expressive expressions and concise statements. Also somewhere in her lineage python had some functional programming ancestry which allows scope for expressing certain situations more flexibly.
So.. What exactly is this python?
Well I'd qualify python by the following salient features
- It's an interpreted programming language.
- It's a language which uses type inference and dynamic typing, which means you needn't specify the type of variables at compile time, and variables can be assigned values of different types without having to worry too much about the risks involved.
- It's an object oriented programming language.
- Seasoned with condiments from functional programming, it delivers that flexibility too, without the concomitant obscurity associated with functional languages.
- It has a _huge_ standard library base catering to almost all conceivable requirements.
- It is concise and succinct, reducing code size to probably 30% of the C++ analogue.
On the whole, it's one hell of a language.
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