<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/13/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Peter Bowyer</b> <<a href="mailto:peter@mapledesign.co.uk">peter@mapledesign.co.uk</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">At 06:46 13/02/2007, kirby urner wrote:<br>>Flash forward: have you seen O'Reilly's 'Head First' series and
<br>>its use of icons, sidebars, jokes, diagrams, different type faces,<br>>more icons? Way more "right brained" than traditional CS books,<br>>by a long shot, but just as technical and deep (into Java mostly).
<br>>We've asked Tim about a "Head First" about Python, but the<br>>word back, at least then, was we had too small a footprint as<br>>a nation (he has these publisher maps he projects at OSCON)<br>>to merit such a sophisticated and expensive undertaking. We
<br>>all still dream of it though.<br><br>Is there anything to stop us/someone copying this style of book, and<br>producing one for Python?<br><br>Peter</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>No nothing, and I think 'Head First' is a trend setter. But of course we</div>
<div>of the OSCON tribe would feel glad if the O'Reilly name were on the </div>
<div>cover, means we still matter on maps that we care about. A cheap </div>
<div>rip off wouldn't feel so good. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Not that those are the only two alternatives.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Multimedia publishing is no one's monopoly, and many publishers </div>
<div>besides O'Reilly already have promising track records with Pythonic </div>
<div>titles (though I don't really like the ones that overpad with the very </div>
<div>same XML poopka, regardless of language, just to thicken the books,</div>
<div>make 'em appear meaty. 'Python in a Nutshell' is at the other end of</div>
<div>the spectrum, somewhat thick, but spare, lean and clean. It's not a</div>
<div>teaching text though, so much as a reference).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Myself, I'm focusing on the anime we want around Python, like a </div>
<div>cartoon snake slithering into view showing off __rib__ syntax, going </div>
<div>in to split screen views with source code in a stepper, coupled with </div>
<div>animal behavior in some 4D++ environment (e.g. Panda 3D).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>On the one hand, source code, on the other hand, Sims. What we'll</div>
<div>be sharing with adults, not just children, under the CP4E banner.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>To this end, I've voluntarily sunk a lot of my after tax time and energy </div>
<div>into startup think tanks, such as Wanderers and the Portland </div>
<div>Knowledge Lab (the latter named after a London version I visited </div>
<div>last April, stole the idea from (hi Phillip)).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Another thread we've shared here on edu-sig is around "rich data</div>
<div>structures." </div>
<div> </div>
<div>I don't know how much need you'd have for 100 nouns and/or verbs </div>
<div>in a lookup table, columns being the different human languages, </div>
<div>but I'd think there'd be similar wheels you'd not want to have to </div>
<div>reinvent, over and over. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Do you use any SQL?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>College professors, banding together on open source principles (already </div>
<div>deeply engrained in the culture, as scholarship ethics), oughta be able </div>
<div>to divvy the labor and build up a relevant stash of Pythonic data sets</div>
<div>pronto, in whatever the science and/or humanity. Just having the planets,</div>
<div>with their distances from the Sun, relative radii, in a freely downloadable</div>
<div>Python dictionary of tuples say, would be a boon to middle schools </div>
<div>across the land. That data could be bundled with such as my orbits.py,</div>
<div>to generate VPython animations.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><a href="http://www.4dsolutions.net/cgi-bin/py2html.cgi?script=/ocn/python/orbits.py">http://www.4dsolutions.net/cgi-bin/py2html.cgi?script=/ocn/python/orbits.py</a></div>
<div> </div>
<div>A final relevant thread I can think of, is 'suMerian', a mnemonic for </div>
<div>how the antiquities have made it still cool to learn so-called "dead </div>
<div>languages" (a basis for promotion). Computer science is a relatively</div>
<div>new discipline, compared to teaching ancient Greek or Latin or </div>
<div>whatever, but has this emerging challenge of either needing to </div>
<div>groom future generations of so-called "dead language" programmers, </div>
<div>OR try to tell industry why it should pay to have perfectly good source </div>
<div>code rewritten, simply because no one teaches M any more (hence </div>
<div>the capital M in 'suMerian'). Put another way, there's still a market</div>
<div>for FORTRAN coders, even FORTRAN compiler optimizers. I've </div>
<div>schmoozed with such people at OSCON, know they exist in the flesh.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Kirby</div>
<div> </div></div>