Usually, the release number of a programming language that's used on a 'first level' course doesn't make a big difference as the changes tend to be quite minor - after all, languages cannot change much for who would develop e piece of code using a syntax that was likely to go out of date? But that's not the case between Python 2 and Python 3, where there were / are distinct changes. For our courses, we're currently 'in transit'

As part of the introduction at the start of the course, I explain a little about the releases and listen to where the delegates are in the changeover. I then present the course as appropriate. Examples in Python 2 and Python 3 will both be available, and delegates will have the choice of which to use during practicals.

Why have we not switched every course to the latest version?

Changes are NOT so large that we need to run two courses.

There is a lot of existing Python 2 code to be maintained, so lots of people still need to know about that

It is recommended that you carry on coding in Python 2.6 until all your target systems have been upgraded, using the 2 to 3 converter each time you're installing on Python 3. So there's a lot of coding still going on using 2.6 syntax!

Our next Python courses:
Learning to program in Python - for those with no prior programming - starts 16th August 2009
Python Programming - for those with no prior programming - starts 17th August 2009

If you have missed those dates, click on the link to the course description pages and you'll see the forthcoming dates
(written 2009-07-10, updated 2009-07-11)

 Y300 - Python 3 - What is New?
  [2871] Moving from Python 2.6 to Python 3 - (2010-07-14)
  [2778] Learning to program in Python 2 ... and / or in Python 3 - (2010-05-24)
  [2559] Moving the product forward - ours, and MySQL, Perl, PHP and Python too - (2010-01-01)
  [2285] Great new diagrams for our notes ... Python releases - (2009-07-13)
  [1791] The road ahead - Python 3 - (2008-09-10)
  [1788] Python 2 to Python 3 / Python 3000 / Py3k - (2008-09-07)
  [753] Python 3000 - the next generation - (2006-06-09)

Y305 - Optimising Python
  [2462] Python - how it saves on compile time - (2009-10-20)
  [2369] Using a cache for efficiency. Python and PHP examples - (2009-08-21)

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