A Byte of Python

A collection of 38 posts

A Byte of Python

Created an app for live preview of Pandoc

When my wife was editing my books, she used Mou.app for live preview of the text so that she knows what the output is going to be like. The caveat was that Mou.app does plain Markdown and not Pandoc format which would mean the preview would be screwed

A Byte of Python

Everyday reminder about Impact

Everyday I get emails from readers of my books that makes me wonder: Am I continuing to make an impact everyday? Can I have the same impact again through my work? Maybe, let’s see. But still, it’s difficult to top this: I’m a 16-year-old boy from Guangxi,

A Byte of Python

Coding Problems for Homework

“Coding Homework” is a small website that I have built to list small problems that one can work on, to learn how to use a new programming language. For example, small problems requiring to read from a file, or to use regular expressions, how to find duplicate files in a

A Byte of Python

An interactive version of A Byte of Python

Roorky is a new startup that has created a new file format and software for interactive books. As part of the default installation of the software, they are bundling A Byte of Python free with the software. What is interesting is that this may help complete beginners who stumble in

A Byte of Python

Interview with CocoaCast

I was recently interviewed by CocoaCast (mp3) to talk about Python for their Mac developer community, as part of their “Unbound Developers” podcast series. I was apprehensive about doing this because I’ve never been live-interviewed before, but in the spirit of doing new things, I went ahead and it

A Byte of Python

A Byte of Python in hard copy

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to read a physical book vs. online books, then you’ll be happy to know that the A Byte of Python book is now available as a printed hard copy. The best part is that the hard-working translators can also publish

A Byte of Python

Book updated for Python 3.0

After a gap of 3.5 years, I’ve finally updated the ‘A Byte of Python’ book. The interesting news is that it is updated for the upcoming Python 3.0 language making it probably the first book to be released for Python 3.0. The book is now a

A Byte of Python

Brazilian Portuguese Bytes of Python

Samuel Dias Neto has translated “A Byte of Python” to Brazilian Portuguese. Hats off to Sam! Update on 2011-Sep-01: Link updated

A Byte of Python

German Bytes of Python

Yesterday, I got this mail from Christoph Zwerschke: Thanks a lot for “A Byte of Python”. Since I thought it would be great if Python gets more popular in German, I participated in the German translation project at BerliOS started by Lutz Horn. Unfortunately, the translation progress stalled last year

A Byte of Python

Byte of Python is now a wiki

In a recent discussion on the byte-of-python list, an enthusiastic bunch of people were interested in seeing A Byte of Python available as a wiki so that readers can contribute directly as well. So, I followed up and made this announcement on the list recently : Hello all, As we have

A Byte of Python

foss.in day 2

Today morning, the first session was a Linux Kernel roadmap by Jonathan Corbet. Although I’ve never been a kernel-level guy, the talk was interesting and he clearly explained how features have been added and improved over the various versions, and how the development process has improved and become more

A Byte of Python

Thout Bytes

OSoft, Inc. have released my book ‘A Byte of Python’ in Thout format. There are two aspects of Thout – one is that the Thout format is based on XHTML and second, the Thout reader software (similar to Windows .chm Help Viewer) is available for all the major platforms. I am

A Byte of Python

Coming soon : Learn Python in German!

Lutz Horn, Bernd Hengelein and Christoph Zwerschke have volunteered and started to translate my Python beginner’s book to German! The project is hosted at developer.berlios.de/projects/abop-german. If you know Python and German, you’re most certainly welcome to join the translation as well. You can start

A Byte of Python

Learn Python in Chinese!!

Juan Shen has translated my beginner’s book on Python ‘A Byte of Python’ to Simplified Chinese!  Juan Shen is postgraduate at Wireless Telecommunication Graduate School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China PR. You can read the Chinese version online right now. More details about Juan Shen and his efforts to

A Byte of Python

Redesigned my book website

I have redesigned ByteOfPython.info and now have a nice and clean theme based on Negen. The theme had the right combination of the two things I look for : simple and attractive. I usually like to hack up a theme myself just like I did for my blog, but this

A Byte of Python

Deliciously popular!

This is cool – ‘A Byte of Python‘ is the most popular link for the python tag in del.icio.us! In fact, its been bookmarked by 53 people (as of now)! Thanks to Prem for telling me about it :) Update: Its bookmarked by 119 people as of now.

A Byte of Python

Byte parts

I’ve been working on restructuring my book and split it into Part I – The Language and Part II – The Libraries. I am designing it such that readers can learn the language from Part I and be happy. Whenever they need to do more stuff such as GUI and databases

A Byte of Python

Byte of Python list is formally open

I am formally announcing the Byte of Python book mailing list. The first post is reproduced below for your convenience: Hello everyone! Welcome to the Byte-of-Python mailing list :)  Its exciting to write this first post! New version I just released version 1.20 of ‘A Byte of Python’ [1] and

A Byte of Python

Byte of Python revived

The 1.20 version of ‘A Byte of Python’ is finally out – this new release has been long overdue – more than 9 months since the last release. This is the revival of the snake charmer ;) This new version is a rewrite of the book and I’ve improved the explanations

A Byte of Python

Python workshop at NIT Calicut

I’ve been invited to conduct a workshop on Python at NIT (formerly REC), Calicut, Kerala. It’ll be most probably on 29th of this month (date to be yet confirmed). I’m glad to tell you that Pradeep will be joining me – we’ll be conducting an on-hands session

A Byte of Python

Distro considerations

I was using MEPIS Linux for the past 4 days after a high recommendation by Pradeep and I was remarkably surprised by the ease of install. First of all, it acts as a LiveCD so you can test out everything before you do any install and then you then click

A Byte of Python

Talking Python

I tried to get some work done yesterday but after a long day and me being the lazy guy that I am, I just went to sleep after getting back… I woke up today morning and started working on the slide and had a few more practical examples comparing some

A Byte of Python

Recursive searching

I thought I’d take some time out and read up on Python metaclasses, so I entered "python metaclasses" in the google (yeah, google) search bar in Firefox and pressed go and guess what I was looking at – my own blog post! :-O

A Byte of Python

Gloomy Weather

It’s such a gloomy weather here in Bangalore… sigh. It’s been raining cats and dogs and as a result I got cold, cough and fever… and I’m just recovering now. However, I did manage to read ‘Ignited Minds’ by Abdul Kalam over the weekend. All I can

A Byte of Python

My book in a Microsoft magazine!

Here’s a paragraph from an article in the Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online: "To learn Python, I’d start with Core Python Programming by Wesley Chun. The online documentation and tutorial is also terrific. A great free tutorial called “A Byte of Python” is available at http://www.python.