[Tutor] looking for some general advice

[Alan Gauld]

Michael,

That's a fairly big project for a first timer, its obvious that you 
are new to Python rather than to programming. It looks 
pretty good to be honest, the main things I'd flag are:

1) Best to be specific in your except clauses. Generic 
catch-anything type clauses can lead to misleading error 
messages. They are OKmat the top level of a program for 
distribution as a way of shielding innocent users from stack 
traces but during development and especially inside your 
code its better to catch specific exceptions.

2) Rather than putting the exception name in quotes 
"IndexError" just leave the quotes off and raise/catch the 
error class directly.

3) argv = sys.argv 
Doesn't really achieve much, you might as well just use sys.argv, 
it's not much extra typing! nit-picking...

4) For completeness you could avoid the os.system call to 
wget and implement it as a Python function using the ftplib 
library... (But to be honest wget is a lot easier!) Or maybe 
use the new subprocess module instead of os.system.
You might also want to check that wget executed successfully.

Othewise I don't see too much to complain about.

Well done, a good first program.


-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld