Python comes with its own code editor: IDLE (Integreted Development and Learning Environment). There is some lore that the name for IDLE comes from Eric Idle, an actor in Monty Python. An IDE is an editor for programmers that provides color highlighting of key words in the language, auto-complete, an "experimental" debugger and lots of […]
The Python programming language has several built-in types that it supports. One of my favorites is the dictionary. A dictionary is a mapping object maps hashable values to arbitrary objects (source). Other languages call dictionaries "hash tables". They are mutable objects that you can change whenever you want to, unlike tuples. A dictionary's keys must […]
Last week I was doing some Test Driven Development training and overheard someone mention another programming language that had a test runner that you could set up to watch your project directory and run your tests when the files changed. I thought that was a neat idea. I also thought I could easily write my […]
This week we welcome Luke Plant as our PyDev of the Week. Luke is one of the core developers of Django, a very popular Python web framework. Luke writes a blog with many articles about Django. If you'd like to see some of Luke's contributions, then you will want to wander over to his Github […]
Last year I ran into a situation where I needed to know if a function had been called. Basically we were trying to prevent shutting down a Twisted event loop twice or starting two of them. Anyway, in my research I stumbled across a fun post on StackOverflow that showed a couple of ways to […]
My second book, Python 201: Intermediate Python, was just released as an online course over at Educative. I also have Python 101 on there as well. Educative is a pretty new educational website. It's kind of like Code Academy except that they usually charge for access to all their courses. Note: This is NOT a […]
