Learn and Use Python - Friday's Links

I’m an IT worker. That’s one of the ways that computer geeks can pay the bills. I like learning new technologies, and get excited thinking of how to apply these technologies to my day to day problems.

Although a little monotonous work isn’t bad once in awhile, it allows me to listen to podcasts, I don’t want to do it all day. One quick way to get more time to learn, is to automate those monotonous tasks, and to speed up how you perform your other tasks. That’s why Scripting languages are so popular. Python has been around forever, and is a popular choice for both programming and scripting. It’s something I want to learn, and I think you may want to as well. Here are some resources to help you do just that.

Python.org – Of course, you can visit the official site, where they have lots of documentation, including a tutorial, as well as links to the python community and a wiki.

Thanks to the Techie Geek, who recently talked about Python, I leaned about some other great resources, including:

- The Free e-book, Think Python: An Introduction to Software Design.

- Snake Wrangling for Kids, another Free E-Book, aimed at kids 8 years and older, but it should also be good reading for us big kids.

- The Python Group Forums

- CompRookie2000’s wiki

I’ve also found:

The Vaults of Parnassus: Python Resources, which include lots of code, including applications, graphics and networking, just to name a few.

A Useful Command Quick Reference from the Learning python O’Reily book site.

The Love Python blog, which has examples on how to perform tasks in python.

Updated: Art also suggests "Dive into Python", which is a free e-book, and also, especially for beginners, Learn Python in 10 minutes.

Updated: "Invent your own Computer Games with Python" was suggested by the author, Al Sweigart. "Each chapter in the book shows the complete source code for an entire game, and then teaches programming concepts from the examples". - Thanks Al!