PyCon 2009 Tutorial Days

Today the Pycon 2009 tutorial days finished. I attended both TurboGears classes on Wednesday, and then I went to the Py.Test and Internet Programming classes on Thursday. The TurboGears classes were mostly led by Mark Ramm, one of the core TG developers. Unfortunately, his class notes, slides and code samples were riddled with errors and bugs and thus, it was a very frustrating class. He based it on the TG2.0 20 Minute Wiki, which also had a lot of errors a few months ago. I pointed out a slew of these issues with the wiki tutorial a few months ago, but after being told to go learn Sphinx and submit a patch, I stopped paying attention to their site. On the plus side, they handed out some really cool USB sticks with the TG 2 logo imprinted on them. Also, Mark Ramm is a very nice guy, as was his assistant Chris Perkins.

The Py.Test class was very informative, but not very helpful. I had read about most of the stuff they talked about from other Python test frameworks online documentation. I still do not understand how to integrate tests into my own applications, which is pretty sad. I guess I'll have to bang my head against the wall for a while until I just "get it". I give props to Dorsey and Krekel for being able to present so well and for being able to bounce off of each other in a coherent manner.

My final tutorial was Wesley Chun's Internet Programming in Python. He started with socket programming and worked his way through TCP/IP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP and into Django. I had already done most of his examples when I read his book, "Core Python" a couple of years ago. However, he was very organized and I thought it was a good refresher. Plus I got to meet new people!

I am looking forward to the rest of PyCon 2009. If you're here, drop me a line at mike at pythonlibrary dot org.