Hello, I am responsible for converting 30 loosey-goosey Perl scripts into 30 well-documented easy to understand and use Python scripts.
No one has said anything in particular about how this should be done, but the end product should be "professional" looking. So, I'm looking for some books and suggestions which will help me write high-quality scripts. I know about object-oriented programming and application configuration and have spent 6 years doing professional Perl but have decided that Python is the new choice of serious agile developers. Only thing is, I only figured that out 1 month ago and don't really know how to write good code yet :) Documentation ============= I would like browseable HTML documentation for each script. I have started to get some idea of using docstrings within a file and that they can be extracted but would like a pointer to some docs on this practice. `Pydoc <http://docs.python.org/lib/module-pydoc.html>`_ seems to be built around modules and I want to document scripts. Configuration ========== Based on `this thread <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/2ce17e8060ac708c?tvc=1&q=ConfigParser>`__ I plan to use ConfigParser to squirrel away generic information like database connection info. The chapter "table-driven code" in Bruce Eckels' "Thinking in Python" seems like it would've been of help but it is not written. Any weblinks for similar articles? The directory hierarchy is going to be /data/vendor/X where X is a particular data vendor. In /data/vendor/config.ini will be the generic config info along with an index.html giving an overview of the whole shebang. Usage ===== Most scripts will be run from cron and so should be driveable via command-line options. optparse looks very good to me. And I had never thought about required versus optional arguments in the way that it does. What an eye-opener. Searching cheeseshop.python.org/pypi for getopt modules does not work very well by the way. Version Control =============== I've been using bazaar but mercurial seems to be quicker to create forward-facing browseable web repos. And the propagation and pull facilities seem more integrated and useable. But both are highly desireable products. OS X ==== I'm doing all this on OS X. I like Unix but am too dumb for Linux. Windows is a great GUI but I hate the registry and hate jumping back and forth between Windows and Cygwin and never getting the full power of either. I think I'll get 2 Mac Minis - one for the actual data munging and one to back everything up on. Which actual Python distro I will use is going to be based on the data I get from `this thread <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/5c4cde4206d1fbb7/f844fa418e8171dc#f844fa418e8171dc>`_ Books ===== I think these 4 will carry me a long way, but any other suggestions ar welcome: * `Dive into Python <http://diveintopython.org/toc/index.html>`_ * `Text Processing in Python <http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/>`_ * Python Cookbook * Programming Python -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
