TLDR My new Pandas book, Effective Pandas , is released ebook here , physical book to follow soon. You Wrote Another Pandas Book? Yes, I wrote my third (or fourth, if you count Machine Learning Pocket Reference ) Pandas book. In 2016, I released Learning the Pandas Library , and in 2020 I released …
TLDR You need to have skin in the game and invest in yourself. If my courses are too expensive for your part of the world let me know what you can invest in yourself. Blockage Last week something new happened to me. I was blocked on Twitter. It has probably …
Following the release of Illustrated Guide to Python 3 , my friend Michael Kennedy approached me about creating a course for Talk Python. (In his concerted effort to wean people off of legacy Python) He wanted a course with all the new features of Python 3. We planned it out, and …
Down the Training Rabbit Hole In the past few months I have been doing a bit of corporate training for MetaSnake. I have noticed a few things: Programmers that have used Python in a work setting miss details that I consider "beginning" knowledge Programmers that are new to Python keep …
I made a screencast exploring one of Raymond Hettinger's tweets a while back. His 140 character exposition suggested that a student of his wanted to use decorators to unittest functions. #python idea (from a student): @test (inputs=(5,2), output=25) @test (inputs=(2,5), output=32) def mypow(base …
I purchased and built an ErgoDox keyboard over a year ago. I thought it would be good to revisit that since I get asked questions about the keyboard every now and then. What is an ErgoDox? The ErgoDox is the Voltron of keyboards-a combination of open source hardware and software …
Starting something new can be overwhelming and confusing. Where does one start? Where does one desire to go? Because Python (the language, standard library, ecosystem, community, and more) has a such a wide breadth of functionality, it can be even more daunting. I have long been impressed by the abstract …
In addition to some consulting work and catching the tail end of spring skiing, I've been working hard. Early next month I will be selling a course- 90% of Python . A course supplemented with both videos and exercises == HUGE win. I'm a visual learner... the videos help explain further and …
The kind authors of Two Scoops of Django and I have teamed up for a Cyber Monday Sale . Check it out if you are interested in mastering Python and Django!
As blogger James Altucher would say, I finally have a stack of business cards. Physical business cards that I can hold in my hand! OK, they aren’t really cards, they are books. Books the I have written over the past 3+ years. I’ll try to always have a …
Here is an update on what I have been up to in the last while. Python Related I have been approached to do some corporate Python training. I would love to do it but real life has just gotten in the way. I really enjoy helping others learn (hence my …
TLDR I have found the perfect keyboard (for me) that has the following features: Ergonomic Mechanical Switches Split Matrix Thumb keys Programmable Open Source (Bonus) (My new keyboard on my standing desk stand (raised by Logitech box to correct ergonomic height). Old unicomp in background) I’ve become a keyboard …
PyCon is right around the corner, and I am lucky to be able to deliver two tutorials this year. For our Utah Python meeting in January, I will be going over a portion of the Hands-on Intermediate Python Tutorial. People seem to enjoy this tutorial, and since I've been trying …
Every time I see an intern or new junior programmer I fight off the urge to give the the advice I wish someone had given me. So rather than sound preachy, I'm going to pretend that I'm from the movie Frequency and give advice to my younger self. In that …
I continue to prefer Goaltimate for groups of 13 or less. It's a great game, one gets lots of touches and newbies, seasoned folks can play together. I think it improves new ultimate players throws better than ultimate does. It's great for warming up. We usually play until we have …
After a long day of manual labor last weekend, I spent a couple minutes relaxing by converting some PDF's to mobi files so my mom could read them on her Kindle. Her Kindle supports PDF, but reading PDF's on Kindles (especially of the non-DX eink variety) is a pain. You …
I would really like to use the same toolset for publishing POD (Print On Demand) books that I use for ebooks. Yet the pdf generation abilities of both docutils and Sphinx seem more focused on pdf "ebooks"---pdf's that you would read from a computer---not pdf's that are approriate to …
As a seventh grader I had the choice between learning French and Spanish. I choose Spanish because it was practical (or at least my parents convinced me of that), while it seemed that all the cool kids took French. Excuse my French but I think my parents were right---taking French …
Assignments for UTOS Hands-on Tutorials Beginning Python Intermediate Python
Today and tomorrow the Indianapolis Python Workshop is running. From the website, "The Indianapolis Python Workshop for women and their friends is a free, hands-on, beginners' introduction to computer programming." This event was inspired by a similar event in Boston . I love this local effort to empower others by teaching …
Treading on Python will be on promotion today. If you are a Kindle owner and interested in learning Python, today is your lucky day. If you prefer handouts/cheatsheets here's another freebie . Cheers.
This post describes my efforts at using Amazon KDP select to sell technical non-fiction books. After some success in my efforts last month (reaching the top of my sub niche), I can report that I fell back a few spots but for the most part sales have been steady. As …
Here's just a few notes from my PyCon 2012 experience. This was my 7th PyCon, and though the conference has changed over the years, I think it is mostly for the better. A general theme of PyCon this year was data analysis. I'm probably biased since I'm doing that at …
PyCon starts today. It's great to be back in what used to be my backyard for PyCon. I love the Bay Area. To celebrate I'm doing an Amazon KDP Select Promotion on my Treading on Python book . During an Amazon "promotion", the price is reduced to $0.00 for the …
Assigments for PyCon Hands-on Tutorials Beginning Python Intermediate Python
Here is the latest iteration of my beginning Python handout. It has gone through a few iterations over the years. It is pretty cool that about 90% of the basics of Python fits on both sides of a legal sized paper.
Yesterday was the start of the ultimate test of the promise of Amazon KDP Select. The Kindle Direct Publishing Select program is a 90 day exclusivity commitment to Amazon, in return for some reward. Amazon reports authors finding ~30% increased sales due to enrollment. I've read a bunch of fiction …
The Grand Rapids Python User Group meets on holidays. They meet on holidays to discuss decorators (among other things). They also email authors of Python decorator books and ask them if they have free copies to give away at their meetings. Given that I'm subject to the terms of Amazon …
I messed around with Cafepress last night creating a shirt that I will probably use as a prize at my PyCon Intermediate Hands-On Tutorial. It has a pretty good decorator on the back. BTW --- Someone should tell Cafepress about this technology called Ajax...
I am two weeks into my Amazon KDP non-fiction experiment . Guide to: Learning Python Decorators is currently #15 on the Python list as I write this, but was up at 5 during the week. It is aso #1 on the Python "Hot New Releases" , which surprises me because #2 is …
The Utah Python group will be meeting on Thursday, Feb 9th at 7pm. Amji will be doing a short presentation on a memoization decorator and Eric will be giving a preview of his PyCon talk "Interfaces and Python". Cheers.
I am one week into the Amazon KDP non-fiction experiment with my books. Guide to: Learning Python Decorators is currently #12 on the Python list . My sales have already outpaced any Barnes and Noble sales I've had. (Though I'm wondering how much reach Kobo would give me for the international …
Decorators are useful in Python for a variety of reasons. Some common uses are: caching logging timing authorization and lots more … I mentioned in my recent SCALE10x talk that I would have a handout/cheatsheet for Python decorators. Here is a pdf version of the Decorator cheatsheet . It has templates …
tl;dr I'm experimenting with KDP for niche technical programming books. The Marathon Begins About a year ago I decided to write a book. I didn't have a story to tell. I wasn't planning on making money. My impetus was to prepare for a 3 hour long conference tutorial I …
I have the game Carcassonne on my G2 which I purchased at the Android Market. While there are a few things I like about the iOS version better, I think the Android version is a well done game. No, they aren't developed by the same developer, though gameplay is very …
In an effort to remedy only reading to the younger kids, my oldest and I began reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol on the Kindle Fire about two weeks ago. It has been nice to read together and it is really the first book I've read on the Kindle. (I've read …
I learned so much about serif, san-serif, html and css. Hannah, Student in eBooks for Elementary Students I recently had the opportunity to teach a handful of elementary students about eBooks. Every year my daughter's school has what they call "Type 2" classes, where parents come in and teach about …
For the past few months life has been somewhat hectic. Real work has been busy as we have been pushing to release our next generation product. In the meantime, I have been writing a book outside of work. The book, Treading on Python , is a quick paced introduction to Python …
The static blog generator, Octopress , does not generate per category RSS feeds by default. I thought I would need a plugin to do this but it is quite easy and a plugin is overkill. All that you need to do is create a feed file with the appropriate filtering to …
On mobile devices, the address bar takes up too much space. Here is how I made it disappear on this blog. This blog is an Octopress blog so I put it in octopress/source/_includes/custom/head.html , but the code html and javascript should work on any webpage. <meta …
I'm volunteering at my kid's Elementary School to teach eight 45 minute classes. There are various suggested pre-canned courses that one can offer to teach. But I choose to teach a course of my own creation, How to Create E-books . So, I'm currently in the middle of teaching ten 3rd …
Utah Python will be holding the October meeting on Thursday the 13th. We will have two presentations this month. The first will cover profiling of Python applications. The second will cover regular expressions. For someone who threw out the regex hammer from my toolbag, I'm interested in perhaps replacing it …
Can someone please tell me why kindlegen can't handle <pre> ? I have some html: <pre class= "literal-block" > $ python hello.py </pre> And kindlegen kindly gives me this? <blockquote> <div align= "left" > <tt> <br/> $ python hello.py <br/> </blockquote> </tt> </div> Calibre on the other hand seems a little more pleasant …
tl;dr Learn markdown, use octopress Pending shutdown A while ago, I was informed that my old blogging service would shutting down at the end of 2011. They served me well over the years, but this seemed like a good reason to move on. The first thing I did was …
My trusty r52 switches between a state of 100-200 free megs of memory and no memory on the 40 gig hard drive. Rather than investing in an expensive IBM harddrive (I've heard the BIOS on my machine won't take normal OEM drives), I got a new computer. Since I'm a …
I'm in the process of moving over to my new laptop. I run into an issue where a shell script (that worked under gentoo) now no longer works. Here's the error foo.sh: 18: pushd: not found Since I'm running this as sh foo.sh I turn on debugging with …
If you are looking to generate/create/write (but not read) excel spreadsheets from native python (read on linux or macos or even Windows!), then xlwt (a fork of pyExcelerator) is your friend. This library, (and the ancestor) is somewhat unknown, but quite good. The only real problem with using …
For those in the Utah vicinity, and who want to see a cool presentation about python, wiimotes and lasers (or who really like MS products, since most sessions seem dedicated to that), my brother is presenting at Utah Code Camp. It should be a little cooler than the Pycon version …
My brother gave a talk about using python to detect lasers with webcams and also demo'd a prototype of a 3d game with wiimote headtracking. For those who missed the preso, there's now a video up .
As there appears to be some interest in branch coverage and the cool testing/metrics/quality tools that can be built upon it, I've proposed a GSOC project to start the ball rolling. (I assume it will start rolling either way, but allowing someone to devote more time to it …