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Welcome to Panela, Matt Harrison's take on mostly Open Source, Linux, Python, innovation in those areas, other buzzwords and Dick Proenneke. It comes complete with the illustrations as needed. Note the opinions expressed here are merely my opinions and not the opinions of my employer.
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Learn python with my slides, a cheatsheet, me, or a simple game
I gave my abbreviated "Intro to Python Tutorial" class last night at Utah Python Users Group. There was also a nice intro to django by Seth House and a short discussion of "Python in the Industry" by Byron Clark.
So since Duncan asked for some slides, I'll somewhat oblige by providing the reStructured Text source of my slides (easily converted to s5 slides using docutils, or latex, or html....) I didn't want to release them before presenting, since the tutorial is meant to be hands on and actually has programming assignments (and their solutions) in it. Oh yes, and there is one graphic in the deck so here it is:
(Yes, that is a pygments formatted source code outputted to SVG and marked up in inkscape!) The image is meant to explain whitespace and indentation in python.
The slides make reference to
canonicalcat.py. The source for that as well as unittest code and setup.py files as well as an SVG cheatsheet illustrating best practices for python scripts are found here.
I've given some version of this talk 3 times now. I've presented it internally to train employees, in a larger conference setting and in a User Group setting. If any (local) readers out there are interested in hearing this talk for their user group (linux, java, php, ruby, C#....) let me know. If you'd like internal training, I could probably do that for a modest fee as well.
On a somewhat related note, over Labor Day while on vacation with some family, I had the chance to pair program with a 12 year old relative who'd never programmed before. We created a guess the number game (iangame.py). But we added/edited sound too (using Cinelerra), which he thought was cool. (Note that he didn't think the crashing of Cinelerra was cool...) Here's a tarball for that (linux only since it shells out to play the mp3s, but if you have players on OSX or Windows it should be changing 1-2 lines to get it to work...) Since, I now had an engine that would say any number between 0 and 100, I later spent an hour creating a simple addition and subtraction program (funmath.py) for my daughter who just entered kindergarten. That's all here. I think guess the number guessing game is probably one of the simplest programming assignments that a new programmer can understand.
I used this to view you doc:
http://rst2a.com/create/type/
Matt, thanks for posting this! I've been teaching some python again, and
it's always nice to have resources like this available :-) Looks like your
talk went well - congrats!
Nice job, I really like the SVG output.