SnakesInASpace

This is a placeholder page for the upcoming python beginners workshop. If you are interested in it, please help finding a date on the doodle: http://www.doodle.com/mzhdmdpg8t5q55ig

What kind of workshop is this?

This will be a beginners workshop, things I (fs111) want to cover.:

• Brief introduction in the who, what and where in python
• Hello World and the interactive interpreter
• control structures
• built-in types (numbers, strings, lists, dicts, sets etc.) and higher level functions
• input/output
• module system (imports)
• objects and classes and types
• documentation system
• neat little tricks and features you should know (generators, list comprehension, slicing)
• some modules from the standard lib that you should know (OS interface, filesystem, option parsing, xml?, network stuff etc.)
• Q/A all the time of course

How long will the workshop last?

I really don't know. I try to cover the stuff mentioned above and then we can go into freestyle hacking, where we help each other out I guess. As long we do not run out of mate we can go on :-) The list of topics usually too long for one session, so expect a second one.

Stuff you need

I will use the latest release of the Python 2.x series which is 2.6 right now. 3.x is out already for some time but the adoption is low and a big number of 3rd party modules are not ported yet. So what I would expect from you is that you have the following installed:

• python 2.6, which can be downloaded here
• a text editor of choice, anything will do, I use vim. Tips for vim and Python here.
• a shell