TuxTips

I just got my invite a couple of days ago to the beta of Stack Overflow. I’ll save an in-depth review for once the site has officially launched, but I just thought I would write a quick post to say that so far I’m pretty impressed. The site is fast and well designed, and I’ve not run into any major bugs yet. The community seems to be solid (although not as many linux systems developers as I’d like to see) and the reputation system seems like it’s well designed. This looks like it could turn out to be another good site for programmers. I’ll be sure to make a post here once the site goes live, and in the mean time if any of you are already in the beta, my username is CodeninjaTim, so be sure to keep an eye out for me.

In the last article in the Journey to Python series, I had gotten as far as doing some basic math, and displaying some data to the screen. Over the last few days I’ve been working on two new facets of Python which will hopefully allow me to get up to speed in writing programs that are actually useful. This week I’ve played around a bit with reading input from the command line in a python program, as well as interacting with the operating system with the OS library; I’ve also had a chance to look at pydoc to get some documentation, and as per a reader request I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about pythons type system, and how it compares to more strict type systems in languages such as C++ and Java.
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After yesterdays rather long introduction into the whys and wherefores of my decision to learn python, today I’m going to begin to talk about my first steps into learning python. In this post I’ll talk about how I fared getting up and running with python, what references I chose, and discuss my impressions after writing my first program.
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There is something that I have to admit, even though it may cost me a few geek points. I’m not fashionable. I’m not quite the old codger who things things were fine with punchcards and this internet thing is just a fad, I certainly enjoy using the latest version of $whizbang_app, and I’m happy to upgrade my hardware with acme’s Greatest-Thing-Ever(tm). I was using Linux on the desktop when most people were trying to decide if they should upgrade to Windows 98, and I was running Compiz when it was just a couple of tarballs and a neat video from Novell. In certain areas however, I am far more conservative.
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