Python+Beverages

Join us at 4pm every other Friday (see schedule below) for an hour of Python discussion, with beer, tea, and snacks.

We will try to adhere to the following (rough) schedule each week:

• 15-20 minute demonstration on an important concept (e.g. plotting, data analysis, curve fitting, MCMC, etc.)
• 10-15 minute "talk" from someone about how they use Python in their research
• 20 minutes to discuss problems and questions!

Of course, if people have ideas, questions, or things they really want to talk about we can change things around!

The first meeting will be this Friday, April 13th, at 4pm in the Library!

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Schedule:

April 13

• Where to get help with Python
  • For tutorials and guides, see:
    • ​Official Python Tutorial
    • ​Dive Into Python <--- This is a really awesome website
    • ​Using SciPy
    • ​Python FAQ
  • For debugging errors and finding solutions to problems, see:
    • ​Stack Overflow
  • Other good resources:
    • ​Scicoder
    • ​astrobetter
    • ​List of Astronomical Packages
    • ​W4260: Modeling the Universe
• Text editor
  • Python's IDLE suuuccckkksss
  • There are a bunch of free options with way better features. Full list is ​here, but I recommend:
    • ​TextWrangler (mac)
    • emacs (has a Python styler, see ​here) (mac, linux, windows)
    • ​komodo edit (mac, linux, windows)
    • ​Kate (*nix only)
  • There are also some really nice paid editors:
    • ​BBEdit (mac) -- this is basically the full-featured version of TextWrangler
    • ​Coda (mac)
    • ​TextMate (mac)
    • XCode (Free-ish)
• Python package manager
  • ​PIP
  • This replaces the default "easy_install".
  • A list of packages in PIP's repository are listed at ​the Cheese Shop
  • Installing new packages is as easy as pip install <packagename>
• Debugging code
  • Rather than fill your scripts with a ton of print statements to comment and uncomment, I'll show you how to use the packages ​argparse and ​logging for more efficient verbosity control.