New to Python, familiar with Perl - Seeking info sources

Brett Ritter swiftone at swiftone.org
Thu Jul 24 09:53:43 EDT 2008


After many years happily coding Perl, I'm looking to expand my
horizons. [no flames please, I'm pretty aware of Perl's strengths and
weaknesses and I'm just here to learn more, not to enter religious
debates].

I've gone through some of the online tutorials and I'll be browsing
the reference before starting the "code a lot" phase.

My question is: What are the best sources to learn best practices or
get the answers to questions?  Are there any good sources to tell me
what Perl habits are good/bad in the Python paradigm?  What about
common packages that will change my life?  (I do a lot of web work,
but also a lot of DB reporting)  I'm also working as a Java developer
primarily, so I'm glad to see that Jython has been resurrected, but
I'm focusing on vanilla Python for the moment.

As examples: PerlMonks has been my info source.  The Perl Best
Practices and Higher Order Perl books have been my tutors into better
coding practices.  CPAN has my life easy, giving me access to the DBI,
Class::DBI (and its successors), HTML::FillInForm,
Data::FormValidator, CGI::Application, and Text::CSV::Simple modules
that are staples of my coding.   The (occasionally complete) Perl
Advent calendars have proven to be a good source to learn about
helpful modules that I might not otherwise stumble across.

(I've encountered Django, but I'm getting my fill of "frameworks" from
Java for the moment, so I'm looking for lightweight pieces at the
moment)

My (admittedly brief) searches here and on google didn't lead me to
any particular spots of concentrated Python info, and most of the Perl/
Python stuff is either a smug attack by one camp on the other or a
rant about the behavior of an obscure feature between the two.

Any recommendations?  Thanks in advance.






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