Blog
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Fun with floats
I’m in Shanghai, and before I left to teach this morning, I decided to check the weather. I knew that it would be hot, but I wanted to double-check that it wasn’t going to rain — a rarity during Israeli summers, but not too unusual in Shanghai. I entered “shanghai weather” into DuckDuckGo, and got…
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Announcing: An online community for technical trainers
Over the last few years, my work has moved away from day-to-day software development, and more in the direction of technical training: Helping companies (and individuals) by teaching people how to solve problems in new ways. Nowadays, I spend most of my time teaching courses in Python (at a variety of levels), regular expressions, data…
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Speedy string concatenation in Python
As many people know, one of the mantras of the Python programming language is, “There should be one, and only one, way to do it.” (Use “import this” in your Python interactive shell to see the full list.) However, there are often times when you could accomplish something in any of several ways. In such…
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Want to learn Chinese?
I run a side project that has nothing to do with computers or programming: Every Monday, I publish “Mandarin Weekly,” a curated collection of links and resources for people learning Chinese. I’ve been studying Chinese for nearly two years now, and it is one of the most interesting and fun (and challenging!) things I’ve ever…
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Another free regexp Q&A webinar!
The last Webinar I did, with Q&A about regular expressions, was great fun — so much, that I’ve decided to do another one. So, if you have questions (big or little) about regular expressions in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and/or PostgreSQL, sign up for this free Webinar on Monday, April 11th: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/regexpqa2 If you already have…
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Free Webinar: Regexp Q&A
To celebrate the publication of my new ebook, Practice Makes Regexp, my upcoming Webinar (on March 22nd) is all about regular expressions (“regexps”) in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL, as well as the Unix “grep” command. Unlike previous Webinars, in which I gave a presentation and then took Q&A, this time will be all about…
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Yes, you can master regular expressions!
Announcing: My new book, “Practice Makes Regexp,” with 50 exercises meant to help you learn and master regular expressions. With explanations and code in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL. I spend most of my time nowadays going to high-tech companies and training programmers in new languages and techniques. Actually, many of the things I teach…
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Using regexps in PostgreSQL
After months of writing, editing, and procrastinating, my new ebook, “Practice Makes Regexp” is almost ready. The book (similar to my earlier ebook, “Practice Makes Python“) contains 50 exercises to improve your fluency with regular expressions (“regexps”), with solutions in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL. When I tell people this, they often say, “PostgreSQL? Really?!?” …
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All 50 “Practice Makes Python” screencasts are complete!
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve completed a screencast for every single one of the 50 exercises in my ebook, “Practice Makes Python.” This is more than 300 minutes (5 hours!) of Python instruction, helping you to become a more expert Python programmer. Each screencast consists of me solving one of the exercises in real-time,…
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Free Webinar: Pandas and Matplotlib
It’s time for another free hour-long Webinar! This time, I’ll be talking about the increasingly popular tools for data science in Python, namely Pandas and Matplotlib. How can you read data into Pandas, manipulate it, and then plot it? I’ll show you a large number of examples and use cases, and we’ll also have lots…