Python Study Group
February 4th, 2008
I’m starting a Python study group at work and am looking for ideas. We’ll probably meet weekly and will review Learning Python, by Mark Lutz. Weighing in at 700 pages, however, it hardly seems practical to cover the entire book. Instead, I think it might be more fun to solve small programming puzzles each week.
So hoosgot a list of small programming tasks we can choose from each week? Perhaps something along the lines of Project Euler, but much easier and less Math-focused. Our goal is to learn Python from the ground up, starting with simple programming exercises.
Ideas?
Take a look at Dave Thomas’s Code Kata (http://codekata.pragprog.com/)?
To start learning python I used a “real-world” problem: a sudoku puzzle from my daughter’s homework, which has given me enough grief when I tried to solve it “manually” …
I’ve written a Sudoku solver in Java…that’s a really good idea. It touches on many aspects of programming including parsing simple data files, formatting output, looping, recursion, etc. It’s hard enough to be fun, but easy enough for a learning exercise.
Recently, I thought it would be nice to produce a report of our cron jobs, with the cron expressions translated into “human-readable” format. I thought it would be easy to find a hack for that, but to my astonishment there weren’t 200 million solutions to this problem out there. There were 0 (at least I turned up none in about 10 minutes of searching).
It seems like an interesting problem to me, but I’m too lazy and stupid to solve it
. Have at it…