[Baypiggies] Discussion for newbies/beginner night talks

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

> 4. My interest in Python is for developing GUI-based data displays and analysis
> of the results from  my software which models unsteady free-surface
> flow in rivers, canals, storm sewers, and related structures.

Neat!

> 5.2 A recent "newbie graduate", whose only exposure to object-oriented programming
> came from Python, sharing how they came to understand, view, and use classes,
> inheritance, methods, etc.
> What attracts them to that approach and how is it
> better than the non-object oriented approaches? Comparisons with other object-oriented
> languages are useless to me but might be useful for other newbies.

I think there are many of us, myself included, that could give this
talk if there was enough interest.

> 5.3 Some talks on experience with various graphical interfaces: TK, GTK, pyQT, etc.
> I currently have  some experience with TK, having constructed an interactive package
> to create 2-D time-series plots of flows, and elevations during flood events.
> I have not had time to give another interface a try.   GTK sounds interesting
> in combination with glade.

Drew is quite good with Tk.

I gave a talk on PyGTK and Glade over a year ago, but attendance was
smaller than some of my other talks.  If there were more interest, I
could do it again.

> 5.4 Some introduction to using Python for web programming.  I currently have
> a web site I created and being able add some more dynamic content might
> prove useful.

There's no end to the number of different Web technology talks we can
have.  We had a Twisted talk a while ago.  Perhaps Ben Bangert or I
can give a talk on Pylons + either Mako or Genshi.  We've covered
Plone.  We had a Django talk.

Ok, more Python tidbits:

#) We could quickly cover list comprehensions, generators, and closures.

#) Use generator expressions to transform iterators on the fly.  For instance:

>>> f = open("junk.txt")
>>> f = (line.lower() for line in f)

Now I can pass f to somewhere else, and it'll lower case the lines *on the fly*.

>>> for line in f:
...     print line,
...
foo
bar
bat
howdy!

Happy Hacking!
-jj

-- 
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/