Python in an afternoon - a lecture for experienced programmers

Last Friday afternoon I was set a challenge - to present Python in three hours to a group of 20 very experience programmers who, however, knew nothing about this particular language.

London Bound - an HST seat

The session was in Central London - my directions started off with "Get off the Tube at Oxford Circus", so Londoners will know just how central I mean - so I took First Great Western's Penzance express from Westbury into Paddington. It's great to have power at your seat for laptops these days, though the new airline style seats in second class (oops - standard class!) are a bit tight for working on, and the computer jump horribly when the guy in the seat ahead gets up or flops down.

"Python in a nutshell" - no - that's NOT what I entitled the talk, but I went through the various features that will be mainstream for this group (I had had their applications described to me ahead of time), and I concluded with an example which - in less that 1500 bytes including comments - shows a short and simple use of many of the features os the language.

• Variables and Loops
• Comments
• Lists, Tuples, Dictionary
• Functions, Modules, Object use
• Variable scope
• Documentation Strings
• Regular strings, triple quoted strings and raw strings
• Regular Expressions
• Formatted String Outputs
• File Statuses and File Handling.
• Prompting and reading from STDIN
• Exception handling and error exiting

In some horror, I notice that my example doesn't have a single if statement in it but - hey - I don't think I did too badly in getting so much in to a practical piece of code ... [source code here]

grahamellis$ python lfan

This is a program which reads a web server access log

file and counts the number of times each browser has

visited, outputting the results sorted by the number

of accesses

 

Press return to proceed 

Processing 13973 kbytes

     1 pd95215e4.dip.t-dialin.net

     1 cache-ntc-ab01.proxy.aol.com

     1 host-66-81-36-237.rev.o1.com

     1 cache-mtc-al03.proxy.aol.com

[snip]

   306 sjcd-webcache-3.cisco.com

   309 193.116.20.220

   327 crawler10.googlebot.com

   348 crawler14.googlebot.com

   407 ip68-110-77-129.ph.ph.cox.net

   970 82-33-81-221.cable.ubr03.trow.blueyonder.co.uk

Total of 67756 visits from 5048 hosts

grahamellis$

How did the afternoon go? Well - I enjoyed it and my whole audience remained, right through to a quarter past five when I finished. A handful of excellent questions afterwards. And a comment from my contact there, who isn't technical himself and had meetings during the afternoon - "Graham - I came back at about five and looked in through the window. The degree of concentration after three hours from everyone was quite remarkable".
(written 2008-06-01) 2a81

Associated topics are indexed under

G997 - Well House Consultants - Newsletter Lead Articles
  [3202] Telling you something about us in just one line - (2011-03-15)
  [2743] Public Open Source Training Courses running this summer and autumn in Melksham - (2010-04-27)
  [2538] Open Source Training Centre and Courses for 2010 - (2009-12-16)
  [2425] Weekend and Christmas Promotion - Well House Manor Hotel, Melksham - (2009-09-26)
  [2370] C++, Python, and other training - do we use an IDE - (2009-08-21)
  [2253] Walks in and around Melksham, Wiltshire - (2009-06-21)
  [2119] Make your business a DESTINATION business - (2009-04-05)
  [2052] How was my web site compromised? - (2009-02-24)
  [1912] Book now for 2009 - (2008-11-29)
  [1819] Calling base class constructors - (2008-10-03)
  [1754] Upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5 - the TRY issue - (2008-08-15)
  [1600] Cambidge - Tcl, Expect and Perl courses - (2008-04-04)
  [1545] Letting new visitors know we provide training courses - (2008-02-19)
  [1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
  [1386] New software product for warmblooded programmers - (2007-10-10)
  [1318] Well House Manor - feature comparison against the old place! - (2007-08-24)
  [1224] Object Relation Mapping (ORM) - (2007-06-09)
  [1136] Buffering output - why it is done and issues raised in Tcl, Perl, Python and PHP - (2007-04-06)
  [1065] Graham Ellis - an Introduction - (2007-02-05)
  [1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)

Y101 - Introduction to Python
  [1375] Python v Ruby - (2007-10-02)
  [950] Python and the Magic Roundabout - (2006-11-27)
  [949] Sludge off the mountain, and Python and PHP - (2006-11-27)
  [909] Python is like a narrowboat - (2006-10-30)
  [846] Is Perl being replaced by PHP and Python? - (2006-08-27)
  [834] Python makes University Challenge - (2006-08-15)
  [753] Python 3000 - the next generation - (2006-06-09)
  [745] Python modules. The distribution, The Cheese Shop and the Vaults of Parnassus. - (2006-06-05)
  [712] Why reinvent the wheel - (2006-05-06)
  [710] Linux training Glasgow, Python programming course Dundee - (2006-05-05)
  [629] Choosing the right language - (2006-03-01)
  [444] Database or Progamming - which to learn first? - (2005-09-13)
  [382] Central London Courses - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, MySQL - (2005-07-18)
  [380] Bridging to the customer requirement - (2005-07-16)
  [317] Programming languages - a comparison - (2005-05-20)

Y205 - Further uses of Python
  [1340] Tk locks up - 100% c.p.u. on a simple program (Tcl, Perl, Python) - (2007-09-09)
  [1036] Python Qt, wX, TkInter, and Jython - training?? - (2007-01-16)
  [595] Add a friendly front end with Tk - (2006-02-08)
  [190] Python engines - (2005-01-26)

Back to
Westonbirt Arboretum Postcode

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
Example of OO in Perl

Some other Articles

Checking server performance for PHP generated pages
Slow boot and terminal start on Linux boxes
Factory method example - Perl
Example of OO in Perl
Python in an afternoon - a lecture for experienced programmers
Westonbirt Arboretum Postcode
Equality, sameness and identity - Python
Korn shell - some nuggets
String, Integer, Array, Associative Array - ksh variables
Some useful variables and settings in the Korn Shell

4090 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 at 50 posts per page

4536
This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).

You can Add a comment or ranking to this page

Public Training Courses

Running regularly at our UK training Centre.
[Schedule] - [About] - [Book]

Like this? ??