Very interesting series of threads. I'm sad to see this happen. I switched to Debian from RH as my personal choice back at Potato and have used the live build a couple times that were a real help. Some of the thoughts I had while reading this were 'Wow, I never want to get involved with anything to do with package maintaining' and 'It seems like Ubuntu is pretty much just running the whole show now'. Maybe that's an oversimplification but I really don't like the entire direction that Ubuntu is going in which is why I stopped using it as my default desktop OS. Now I kind of feel like I don't have a 'home base' distro anymore. Sigh.
I'm excited - Learn Python the Hard Way completely jumpstarted me into what has become a large internal django site, and I refer back to it often. I really enjoy python, and I thank Zed for the straightforward aproach.
So even though I love python I want to see if the same technique can introduce me again to C, a language I never felt comfortable with.
No, I'm fully blocking and moderating comments. They are for serious students who need help, not drive-by netizens. In the past I had them open, but after the first two hits by HN or reddit I had to lock it down so that students wouldn't get thrashed.
FWIW i signed up to your udemy course, but I don't particularly feel like making a disqus account to also comment on the book, that's what's bothering me. I guess I will just abstain from commenting though, it's fair enough.
Learn Python the Hard Way is great, although I can't say I've read that many Python books, but I though his approach was a very good way to learn Python.
Although I've been working with django daily for about the past six months, I used bottle for a small stand-alone 'desktop-like' application.
I needed an easy, quick way to take roll call of a large group of people. We have a laptop with a projector but no internet access where the meeting occurs, so it had to be able to live on a Windows machine without network access. Bottle allowed me to pull together something in about five hours that uses sqlite for local storage of all of the participants names and whether they are present/absent and any notes. Previously, I was doing this on an inherited excel spreadsheet and it was very difficult for anyone else to read their name or any information. Now, it's a very simple HTML page with very large font that can be read from the back of the room.
So, thank you bottle! I was able to develop on Linux and fairly painlessly deploy it to the Windows laptop, and it worked the first time. (That was scary... Rarely happens to me.)
I'm curious, how did you justify the return on investment of developing this? In most business situations, "Use Zoom to make the font bigger" would have been the boss reply.
I almost always have to seed Version 1 as a stealth project or weekend project. Version 2 is more likely to be approved once it has been shown useful.
Ah, I should mention that this is for a volunteer non-profit group. They are/were falling into the 'spreadsheet as a database' trap, so this is the first visible step to move off of that and onto something manageable.
The next stage is to get a slightly more comprehensive site going which will keep track of contact information, attendance history, etc.
Is this code that you can put online somewhere? This kind of thing would a) likely be really handy for lots of people and b) is the kind of thing I'd like to be able to make myself (using browser as a readymade UI), so having an existing reference would be helpful.
Thanks for this! I really like these kinds of summaries, because while I love grep and cut and wc and perl, there are commands in here I really haven't heard of.
Plus I enjoy stringing together one-off filters longer than my arm.
