[Tutor] Newbie: First program - looking for feedback :)

[credo]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 16:38:44 -0600, "Christian Wyglendowski"
<Christian.Wyglendowski at greenville.edu> said:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > Hi Pythoneers,
> > 
> > Okay, ive been trying to teach myself python for a few weeks 
> > and i'm making some slow progress, (not a natural coder 
> > here). This started mainly due to me switching from Windows 
> > -> GNU/Linux about a year ago. 
> 
> Cool.  Python is the first general purpose programming language that I
> have learned as well.  I played with PHP on my web site and then moved
> on to Python.  What a breath of fresh air that was!

Hehe, i looked at PHP and dabbled with C/C++ before settling on Python as
it seemed to be easier to grasp and also powerful in many areas :)

> > I find i am getting comfortable with GNU/Linux now, and it 
> > has recently encouraged 
> > me to try my hand at programming; for those times when you 
> > wished you had a 
> > little tool to do something :). 
> > The possibilty of helping the open source commnunity by 
> > contributing to software 
> > development etc is also a plus, although a distant dream at 
> > this point.
> > ;) 
> 
> Good goals.  I have had the most fun with some of the little "tools"
> that I have written for mine and others' benefit.  I hope to contribute
> to the open source world someday as well.

I'm starting to find some reward in simple little tools, now that i seem
to be making some progress with the language. It seems a natural thing
for me to hopefully contribute something back to the open source
community and it pleases me to find others with the same intentions.
Perhaps we end up working on something together ;) - I have some way to
go still :p
 
> > My primary goal is to have some fun with this. I believe 
> > selecting Python as my first language was the right choice :)
> > 
> > With this in mind, and with some embarrassment, i post my 
> > first *real* python program. 
> 
> Well, I don't have any specific stuff to say about your code (Alan had
> some good thoughts that I don't need to rehash).  I would, however,
> suggest that you revamp the program as a command line utility.  You
> could really trim down the size of your program and it would be more
> flexible (you could pass onlyone.mp3 or *.mp3 in a directory).
> 
> There's my thoughts.
> 
> Christian
> http://www.dowski.com
>

Well, i have the command line at heart. I use Slackware and have fallen
in love with the Terminal after using primarily GUI in Mandrake 9.1
previously.
I did find the lack of the *.mp3 funcionality in the lame encoder to
decode/encode a batch of files surprising, although i may have missed
something in the man page.

Still it was a good excuse to try solving the problem myself and i am
really just flexing my understanding of the language at this point adding
functions etc to do cool stuff that is not really required save to use
different libraries to solve probs etc.

I have a larger project in mind that will benefit from my tinkering, but
thats in the future :)
Thanx for your comments and good luck with your own goals ;)

cheers

Credo

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