[kwlug-disc] Python

[Ryan McGreal]

On Sun, January 8, 2012 11:41 pm, William Park wrote:
> "manipulating spreadsheet" caught my eyes.  What do yo mean?
> Are you parsing out XML file that Excel saves in?

There's a great python library for manipulating xlsx files:

https://github.com/staale/python-xlsx

As for the more general discussion, for the past few years Python has been
my primary coding language (I mainly build web applications). It's
powerful and expressive, has a clean syntax and a useful set of data
types, is multi-paradigm (everything is an object, but it also supports a
more functional style), and has a broad, robust ecosystem of open source
libraries.

I particularly like the use of significant whitespace. I already indent
blocks for readability, and it's nice that I don't have to duplicate my
denotation with curly braces.

I first learned Python using Mark Pilgrim's charming _Dive Into Python_
[1]. However, today I would caution that the original edition is quite
dated while the new version is specifically for Python 3, which breaks
compatibility with the version (2.x) that is generally in production.

If you're learning Python as a first programming language, Zed Shaw's
_Learn Python The Hard Way_ [3] looks quite promising.

Regards,
Ryan McGreal

References

[1] http://www.diveintopython.net/
[2] http://diveintopython3.ep.io/
[3] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/