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Show HN: Crash into Python

stephensugden.com

107 pointsgrncdr14 comments

Great documents for getting up to speed quickly! These are the kinds of tutorials I often miss: tutorials that assume that you are already a programmer and go fast. Well done :)

Bug:

    birth_year[1] == 1341 # Raises an exception

should be either:

    birth_year[1] == 1341 # False

or:

    birth_year[1] = 1341 # Raises an exception

Thanks for the bug report, fixed now.

Great slides!

A QA note: The text spills offscreen and the CSS doesn't allow me to make it readable in Chrome on a 13" MacBook Air:

http://drktd.com/9JL2

Thanks, it's odd that didn't work, as I've been working on these on an 11" MBA with chrome. As I mentioned in a reply below, there are also plain HTML versions of the slide sets that might be more suitable for reading.

Edit: Ah, it happens in full-screen. Too much text on that slide then. ;)

Edit 2: Tightened up the wording on that slide a bit. Should fit now.

The strength of this is precisely that it's a crash course.

I've tried some recommended Python tutorials (couldn't name any of them), and they try to cover everything. For example, instead of showing all the useful stuff across all categories, they try to teach you every exception and technical detail for the entire category (string manipulation, for example).

I've started working on these slides for a set of tutorials I plan to give at $work. As I went on I thought they might be valuable to others, so I added an index page and posted them up. I'd truly appreciate any feedback the HN community could provide me with.

This is much more helpful than I could have imagined. The writing is concise with solid, insightful examples. I read a few introductory Python texts before (Learn Python the Hard Way etc) that are really a waste of time if you understand programming concepts.

Any chance the author can make a PDF or ePub version? I like to read it on my portable devices.

I'm sure I could, as the sources are just ReStructured Text. I've been meaning to update the index page to have links to non-slide versions of each document as well. If you take the ".s5" out of the URLs they are plain HTML.

Edit: The titles link to normal HTML pages now.

>...teaching aid for bringing programmers from other languages up to speed with Python.

Off-Topic, is there anything similar for people wanting to learn Objective C?

Awesome. Thank you. Any chance of a Ruby version?

Not really as I don't write enough Ruby to feel comfortable teaching it. If any Rubyist out there wants to steal this format and approach I would happily link to (and use!) it.

Source files are all available at *.rst and there is a Makefile at stephensugden.com/crash_into_python/Makefile as well.

Is it true that Python has dynamic scoping? I would have thought that it was lexical...

Ah, you are correct, Python scoping is lexical. The point I wanted to make was more about no pre-declaration and I mixed up what I was trying to say.

Thanks for pointing that out, it's now corrected :)

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