If you don't like starting at the beginning, try starting with the example code and programs. Also, check your progress through the course. Table of Contents Forward 1: Python Calculator 2: What is a Computer Language? 3: Conditional Statements 4: Loops 5: Introduction to Graphics 6: Back to Looping 7: Introduction to Lists 8: Random Numbers 9: Introduction to Animation 10: Functions 11: Excel Macro Demonstration 12: Controllers and Graphics 13: Bitmapped Graphics and Sound 14: Introduction to Classes 15: Introduction to Sprites 16: Libraries and Modules 17: Searching 18: Array-Backed Grids 19: Sorting 20: Exceptions 21: Recursion 22: Formating Example code and programs

Background Python is the main scripting language used at Google. This style guide is a list of dos and don'ts for Python programs. To help you format code correctly, we've created a settings file for Vim. For Emacs, the default settings should be fine.

Tired of waiting for Raspberry Pi? With delay after delay, and no fixed release date in sight, maybe it’s time to look for an alternative

The Raspberry Pi is no doubt a very exciting device, with an unmatched ratio of size, power, and value. However, after months of delays and false starts ranging from manufacturing problems to certification issues, the open source wonder board hasn’t actually been delivered to those who have bought it, or would love to buy it. All is not lost though, as there are several alternatives available that might just pique your interest.

The desire to learn new things. The desire to build something that has never before been built. The desire to hunt down problems--and then solve them. It was at this moment I realized something. Something which, to me, is an incredibly powerful revelation. Often times, I find myself hunting for solutions. I find myself desperately trying to figure out what I should do about X, and how to optimize Y. I find myself searching for solutions to problems, hoping to get them out of the way as quickly as possible so that I can move onto the next thing, the next chore, the next item on my todo list. It was in this moment that it all became clear to me-- I enjoy the problems. I crave them.

For now, it is more of an introduction into programming and the Ruby programming language, than it is a full course that teaches you all there is to know about Ruby or how to code. Closing Words There is nothing wrong with that approach though, and the instructions given are clear and concise. You can check the Hackety website for things to do after you have finished the four lessons, especially Learn Ruby The Hard Way seems to be a good next step. If you are trying to learn a programming language and do not really have a preference right now, then Hackety Hack can be a good easy start into the programming world.

The Bastards Book of Ruby is an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts, and anyone else whose job is to seek out, make sense from, and show the hard-to-find data. This does not require being "good at computers", having a background in programming, or the desire (yet) to be a full-fledged hacker/developer. It just takes an eagerness to be challenged.

Die Seite The Hacker Shelf ist eine wahre Fundgrube. Denn dort gibt es tonnenweise freie Literatur rund um die Themen Programmierung und Informatik nach verschiedenen Tags geordnet. Neben vielen Quellen zu Hochsprachen wie Python, kann man dort auch ausführliche Literatur zu eher technischen Themen wie der Assemblerprogrammierung finden.

If we mix 26 lower case letters, as many upper case, ten digits and a dozen of other symbols, that’s 72 possible characters. Picking 8 of them at random gives 728 possible passwords, or about 49 bits of entropy. It is possible to calculate the exact entropy for a Markov chain, but the math is non-trivial. I guesstimated that this pseudo-japanese is about the same entropy as alternating 15-something consonants with 5 vowels. So for 14-characters passwords, that’s 157 × 57 possible passwords or about 43 bits of entropy; which I decided was good enough for me. Now grab the code and go change all those weak passwords!

A short, readable password generator that can be launched from the command line. Just launch it from the shell and it will print out an 8-character password. You can also specify the length and whether the password should be typed with alternating hands on a qwerty keyboard.

This course has been designed for independent study. It provides everything you will need to understand the concepts covered in the course. The materials include: A complete set of Lecture Videos by Prof. Guttag. Resources for each lecture video, such as Handouts, Slides, and Code Files. Recitation Videos by course TA's to review content and problem solving techniques. Homework problems with sample student solutions. Further Study collections of links to supplemental online content. Self-Assessment tools, including lecture questions with answers and unit quizzes with solutions, to assess your subject mastery.

The SocialBot9000, as [Chris] calls his build, is an Arduino Uno connected to an Ethernet shield and an LCD character display. The firmware uses the Twitter API to search for recent posts containing the phrase, ‘socialbot9000.’ A PHP script on the Arduino does all the heavy lifting and with the great Bildr tutorial on getting the Ethernet shield up and running

Arduino and Python Talking to Arduino over a serial interface is pretty trivial in Python. On Unix-like systems you can read and write to the serial device as if it were a file, but there is also a wrapper library called pySerial that works well across all operating systems.

arduino_serial.py is a Python port of Tod E. Kurt's arduino-serial.c program for communicating with an Arduino microcontroller board over a serial port. It only uses standard Python modules (notably termios and fcntl) and does not require any special serial communications modules.

Classes must be nouns but not every noun must be a class. If your class only has two methods and one of them is init you probably meant to write a function. MuffinMail recently refactored their API; it went from 20 classes scattered in 22 modules down to 1 class just 15 lines long. It was a welcome change, but we'll further refactor that down to a single function 3 lines long. The Python stdlib is an example of a namespace that is relatively flat. You won't find packages that consist of a single module defining an exception, and you won't find many exceptions at all - just 165 kinds in 200k lines of code. That's a tiny ratio compared to most projects including Django. Of course there are things, like containers, that should be classes. As a final example we'll add a Heap type to the heapq module (admit it, you already have one in your utils.py).

This guide is the culmination of a few months' worth of blog posts. The subject is magic methods. What are magic methods? They're everything in object-oriented Python. They're special methods that you can define to add "magic" to your classes. They're always surrounded by double underscores (e.g. __init__ or __lt__). They're also not as well documented as they need to be. All of the magic methods for Python appear in the same section in the Python docs, but they're scattered about and only loosely organized. There's hardly an example to be found in that section (and that may very well be by design, since they're all detailed in the language reference, along with boring syntax descriptions, etc.). So, to fix what I perceived as a flaw in Python's documentation, I set out to provide some more plain-English, example-driven documentation for Python's magic methods. I started out with weekly blog posts, and now that I've finished with those, I've put together this guide.

Today we’re happy to announce that this runtime has graduated from Experimental status and is a fully supported feature of App Engine. To get started, download the latest App Engine SDK for Python and check out the Getting Started Guide. We think the Python 2.7 runtime for App Engine is a great step forward for our developers.

Interaction with python First we import the serial library to python in order to communicate with the arduino (this includes talking over usb)

This application supports the core Python 2.5 language, with no module imports or file I/O. It's meant to be used as a platform for creating programming tutorials, not for running or debugging production code.

Classes and Objects
Object-oriented programming in Python.
Requires: Python
Introduces: Python objects and classes

Motivating questions:

I have a complex program which has lots of duplicated code, is there any way to simplify it?
How do I change the behavior of one part of my program without affecting the rest of it?

There are 3 exercises that go with the first sections of Google's Python class. They are located in the "basic" directory within the google-python-exercises directory. Download the google-python-exercises.zip if you have not already (see the Set-Up page for details).
string1.py -- complete the string functions in string1.py, based on the material in the Python Strings section (additional exercises available in string2.py)
list1.py -- complete the list functions in list1.py, based on the material in the Python Lists and Python Sorting sections (additional exercises available in list2.py)
wordcount.py -- this larger, summary exercise in wordcount.py combines all the basic Python material in the above sections plus Python Dicts and Files (a second exercise is available in mimic.py)
With all the exercises, you can take a look at our solution code inside the solution subdirectory.

Python is a dynamic, interpreted language. Source code does not declare the types of variables or parameters or methods. This makes the code short and flexible, and you lose the compile-time type checking in the source code. Python tracks the types of all values at runtime and flags code that does not make sense as it runs. (todo: link here to the companion video segment for this section)

Where to go next?

If you are an experienced programmer who wants to take his technical SEO skills to the next level or a business which develops and sells  ‘SEO Tools’ then I would suggest learning Python, jQuery & JSON.

Why Learn Python? Google uses Python. Google App Engine which lets you run web application on Google infrastructure is written in Python (besides ‘Java’ and ‘Go’). Python supports multiple programming paradigms.  You can use it as a pure object oriented language or as a powerful scripting language. It is easy to learn and use.  Even kids code in Python. Ok, that last one was a joke.

Why learn jQuery and JSON? Both jQuery and JSON are commonly used in API calls.  If you wish to use APIs to speed up your SEO tasks then you need to be familiar with these languages

Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever

Think Python is the manuscript of Python for Software Design, published by Cambridge University Press.

In support of Free Books, Cambridge has agreed to keep this manuscript available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Readers are free to copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify it, which allows them to adapt the book to different needs, and to help develop new material.

There are both new and old books in this list. For the naysayers: Don’t forget how easy it is to succumb to hype and to phrases like “anything older than 3 months is irrelevant”, “it’s the age of the app”, “desktop is dead”, and so on. That’s simply not true. Reading these books can be very beneficial for you and for your business. The concepts are still valid, the ideas can be still utilized. Even if the world has fatalistically moved on (and it hasn’t), you can’t catch it up without a strong foundation. Many things are cyclical or ageless. You can re-combine ideas, find patterns, get inspired and most importantly, learn new things. These books are a nourishment for your mind. And hey, it can’t hurt to read something different than you are used to read!

Ein zweitägiger Kurs, vollständig dokumentiert auf der Google Code University mit Videos auf YouTube und Übungsaufgaben. Nett gemacht und auch zum Selbst­studium geeignet.

This guide is currently under heavy development, and is mostly a skeleton at the moment. If you’d like to help, fork us on GitHub!

This opinionated guide exists to provide both novice and expert Python developers a best-practice handbook to the installation, configuration, and usage of Python on a daily basis.

The open-source Arduino environment makes it easy to write code and upload it to the i/o board. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The environment is written in Java and based on Processing, avr-gcc, and other open source software.

Tutorial auf IBM developerWorks untergekommen: Data visualization with Processing, Part 1: An introduction to the language and environment. Auf die Fortsetzung dürfen wir gespannt sein.

The Arduino Ethernet Shield allows an Arduino board to connect to the internet. It is based on the Wiznet W5100 ethernet chip (datasheet). The Wiznet W5100 provides a network (IP) stack capable of both TCP and UDP. It supports up to four simultaneous socket connections. Use the Ethernet library to write sketches which connect to the internet using the shield. The ethernet shield connects to an Arduino board using long wire-wrap headers which extend through the shield. This keeps the pin layout intact and allows another shield to be stacked on top.

"I think Qt has a lot to offer people who want to develop applications for (and on) Ubuntu, particularly now. It already powers popular cross-platform applications like VLC, not to mention the entire Kubuntu distribution," he concludes, "It has strong commercial backing as well as a large developer community. No single solution will meet all developers' needs, of course, and Ubuntu supports multiple toolkits and frameworks for this reason, but Qt seems like a great tool to have in our toolbox for the road ahead."

So here's my request to the open source community: make a webpage for your project that summarizes your community's development resources & process. And then link the hell out of it. Link it from all over your project's documentation. Make sure you have a CONTRIBUTING file, but don't put the current information in the file.... it'll just get stale. Instead, put your contributing documentation URL in your CONTRIBUTING file. Tools and processes change, but tarballs get old, and distros are rarely bleeding edge.

cool

an overview to get started with Gears without wading through dozens of pages of documentation yourself

Keeping you up to date with the latest on mashups and the new Web 2.0 APIs

One of many recent posts on the dangers of building atop someone else's API

The GlassFish community is building free, open source, production-quality, enterprise software.