Blog
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Announcing: A free Webinar, and two online courses (functional Python and OO Python)
It’s time again for me to offer a free Webinar, as well as two online courses: I’m repeating my hour-long free Webinar about functional programming in Python on Wednesday, October
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Sorting lists of dicts — an exercise from “Practice Makes Python”
My ebook, Practice Makes Python, will go on pre-sale one week from today. The book is a collection of 50 exercises that I have used and refined when training people
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Thinking with “map”
In the free Webinar I gave yesterday about functional programming, I mentioned that “map,” or its equivalent (e.g., Python’s list comprehensions), is a powerful tool that I use nearly every
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The relative speeds of str.format and %
My most recent blog post talked about the use of str.format instead of the % operator for interpolating values into strings. Some people who read the post wondered about their
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Teaching an old dog new tricks — or, how I learned to love Python’s str.format, and gave up on %
I have been programming in Python for many years. One of the things that I wondered, soon after starting to work in Python, was how you can get Perl-style variable
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Three Pythonic products: A (free) Webinar, a course, and an ebook
I love developing software. I also love helping people to learn how to develop better. That’s why I have been teaching programming classes for more than a decade, and why
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The easiest way to return to the last Git branch
I don’t know about you, but it’s common for me to switch between branches in Git. After all, that’s one of the main advantages of using Git — the incredible
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Remember: Don’t mix = and NULL
I was recently performing an analysis on the database for my dissertation software, and wanted to look at one particular set of rows. The table I was looking at is
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Book Review: The Undercover Economist Strikes Back
In order to get an undergraduate degree from MIT, at least when I was there, you needed to take a certain number of humanities and social-science courses. This was to
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Turning a PostgreSQL array to rows
I’ve spent the last few blog posts in this series talking about PostgreSQL’s arrays — how to create them, query them, and even create them with the ARRAY function. But