Python tutorial

Hi, George -

About 20 or so years ago I learned the rudiments of Python. I want to re-learn. Is 'learn python the hard way' a book or an online source?

Have you looked at online tutorials?

JohnS

Forget 'learn python the hard way' it's a book with the first few chapters online. But much to simple for me.

There is a fire hose of online tutorials... how to choose? I'd try an online course too... if anyone knows a good one.

I've got a big thick book I bought a few years ago, "learning python", but 1500 pages. I could dive into that again.

George H. pages it's too much

John S, this is about the right speed for me.

GH

I learned the tough way 15 years ago: diving in and implementing a National Instruments DAQ interface (I refuse to learn Labview). Installed packages as I discovered I needed them. Learning syntax on the fly (and with the book "Python Cookbook"). Later, pythonXY appeared, with most of the packages an engineer needs pre-installed. More recently, I installed the Anaconda package. Included is Jupyter Notebook, which allows hacking code in your browser. Great way to experiment with code snippets.

Python for Engineers

looks promising.

-Mark

MIT hosted some online courses for a while. I ran through them and got good eonugh to write text programs. The GUI stuff is a lot harder.

Thanks, George. Great link.

Thanks Mark, I agree about labview*. So you always run it with one of these add-on libraries (packages) Anaconda, Numpy, etc.?

Say does anaconda (or others) help you make graphs and such?

Thanks again... (oh for others python XY seems to be only for python2.x and not the later 3.x release.)

George H.

*I knew a tiny bit of labview years ago.. the entire Vanderbilt FEL ran under labview... majorlab view updates could lead to ~six months of code rewrite.

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onal Instruments DAQ interface (I refuse to learn Labview). Installed packa ges as I discovered I needed them. Learning syntax on the fly (and with th e book "Python Cookbook").

re-installed. More recently, I installed the Anaconda package. Included i s Jupyter Notebook, which allows hacking code in your browser. Great way t o experiment with code snippets.

Much of python's usefulness is through these libraries (many of which appea r to be created by graduate students -- free labor). For plotting, the mat plotlib package is most common. Not straightforward to use, bet there are many examples of graphs you can adapt to your particular wants. If you are particular about formatting, that can lead you down the rabbit hole of sta ckoverflow.com.

-Mark

I didn't know anything about Python and a few years ago ended up writing 3000 lines of code for a product. It's a great language -- just get your head around "classes" and here's is a guy that has the best tutorials on youtube-- his user name is thenewboston excellent videos from beginner to advanced

Thanks I'll give it a look see. (mostly I'd rather have text and stuff and not a video.)

George H.

I used Python (for the first time in about 15 years) last year (just as a change from C++) to write a user interface to some custom built hardware. I found Programming in Python 3 (Summerfield - Developer's Library) to be pretty good, as was The Python 3 Standard Library (Hellman) by the same publisher. I'd read Summerfields books on Qt previously and quite liked his approach.

If you're intending to do graphical interfaces I'd recommend PySide2 which is a python wrapper to Qt. You can then use the Qt WYSIWYG tools to build your Gui's. Summerfield also has a book on PyQt (basically the same as PySide but different licensing) which I recommend.

Regarding the packages available, they are really the main reason for learning Python. It's pretty much the language of choice for manipulating data so there are a wealth of interesting packages available.

Apart from the books mentioned you can't go far wrong with anything by the Developer's Library, No Starch Press, O'Reilly or Apress. (Packt publishing have a ton of books on python but I'd stay clear of anything published by them.)

Another think I forgot to mention - jetbrains have a community edition of PyCharm (an IDE) which is nice. Unfortunately it's a Java app so it needs decent hardware to run on.