I put Data Structures and Quantum Mechanics in the same bucket. They are both the absolutely most interesting details of their respective fields but I hated learning about them. Here’s a reasonably nice introduction to data structures through Python.
Maybe if my three different Quantum Mechanics courses had an interactive shell with detailed error explanations I would have enjoyed the subject more.1
No chance. ↩︎
Boy I know some people that will go nuts over these two libraries.1
First up is the MusicBrainz Python library. Fuzzy disc look up from a python script! Very cool.
Did you Marvel Comics has an API? Yeah, that’s awesome. Here’s a nice demo of using it to generate VM’s with random Marvel character names. I could see this being a lot of fun for random string generation. The API has some interesting calls:
My favorite part of this tutorial from PyPix is the context map. That’s how I plan code projects too. I’ve always wondered how competent Python developers planned a complex library. This example walks through creating an FTP library and I found it very useful.
I haven’t done a Pythonista post in awhile. So, here are three cool things about Pythonista for iOS:
Primary School Class on Programming with Pythonista
Backup Your Contacts with Launch Center Pro, Drafts, and Pythonista
TaskPaper Query and Syntax Highlighting
Faker generates a wide variety of fake filler data. It’s not just Loerm Ipsum. It can generate fake addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, MD5, dates, etc. You can also use a seed option if you want to always get back the same “random” result. It works from the command line too.
:::text $ python -m faker address 968 Bahringer Garden Apt. 722 Kristinaland, NJ 09890 This is wonderful.
Brett Terpstra rolled out Cheaters awhile ago. If you are unfamiliar, it is a system for viewing your own custom cheat sheets on the Mac. His version is very attractive and highly functional but requires a Mac to view and a method of creating HTML tables.1
Of course, I like to make things difficult. I want my cheat sheets available to me when I’m away from my Mac, so that means Cheaters will not work for me.
I’m not big into tagging but the support added to Mavericks has me interested enough to give it a try. I wanted a quick way to add or reset tags on files in the Finder so I decided to make a Keyboard Maestro macro that uses the Python script from Jonathan Wight.1
To get started, download and install the script as described. Next, make some Keyboard Maestro macros. These two macros operate on selected files in the Finder and are nearly identical except for the method call in the shell script.
Google has an excellent introduction to Python. It comes with succinct introductions to some of the fundamentals as well as lecture videos and exercises.
Bite Sized Python is a really good resource for keeping up with all things Python.
There’s a beginners section and a news section too. Very nice.
Holy cow this is awesome! Pretty Table is a Python library for creating plain text formatted tables from HTML, CSV, SQL or even row by row insertions.
Take an HTML table with table and td tags:
:::python from prettytable import from_html pts = from_html(html_string) And output it in plain text
:::text +-----------+------+------------+-----------------+ | City name | Area | Population | Annual Rainfall | +-----------+------+------------+-----------------+ | Adelaide | 1295 | 1158259 | 600.
