On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Alf P. Steinbach wrote: > * Robert P. J. Day:
... snip ... > > what other useful commands might i run immediately after > > starting a session whose output would be informative? i can > > certainly poke at some of those objects to see them in more > > detail. i'm just curious what others might recommend. thanks. > > That depends on what you mean by "newbie". > > If it's someone who knows a little bit of programming but is new to > Python, then 'help' would definitely be about the first thing I'd > show her. > > But if it's someone who doesn't even know anything about > programming, then I'd recommend (blatant plug) <url: > http://tinyurl.com/programmingbookP3> -- its first two chapters are > constructed around complete, concrete examples. However, you would > have to adapt just the *sense* of the first chapter, which is only > about tool usage, to *nix, since it's written for Windows. I'd not > dive into 'help' for the someone who doesn't know anything because > it gets technical pretty fast, and because she will get back to that > on her own when it's time. > > Whatever you do, and whatever the background of the newbie, do > introduce turtle graphics right away. ah, thank you, i appreciate that reference. i'm expecting the small audience to be relatively tech-savvy with OO dev experience, and i'm betting that some of them will be wondering right off the very first thing *i* was wondering -- when i start that python3 shell and get dumped into it, what am i looking at? which is why i wanted to collect a few commands to give the attendees at least a vague idea of what was already there. i've collected the following to start with: >>> dir() ['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__name__', '__package__'] >>> globals() ... stuff ... then move on to examine *those* things: >>> type(dir) <class 'builtin_function_or_method'> >>> type(globals) <class 'builtin_function_or_method'> >>> type(__builtins__) <class 'module'> zoom in a bit further and pick on specific examples: >>> dir(__builtins__) ... lots of output ... and so on. as i said, i know it looks dry but i figure i can take 5 minutes or so just to lay out the terrain and what a shell session looks like before you do *anything* with it. and i'm betting most of my audience will appreciate getting that high-level view before launching into some programming. they'll just want to know the initial session setup before they start importing stuff into it. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry. Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ======================================================================== -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
