coding
gregladen | May 11, 2017Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners by super Python expert Al Sweigart is a pretty thick intermedia to somewhat advanced level programming book.
It covers how Python works, so someone familiar with programming languages can get up to speed. Then, the book tackles a number of key important tasks one may use a computer for. This includes working with Regular Expressions, file reading and writing, web scraping, interacting with Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, scheduling things, working with email, manipulating images, and messing around with the…
gregladen | April 26, 2017Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math is yet another addition to the growing list of programming books for people interesting in learning programming.
Basic is an under-appreciated language. I wish I had a good basic compiler handy, and I'd love to see a basic scripting version that worked like bash. Can you see the value of that?
Anyway, Small Basic is an updated modernish basic that runs only on Windows, so while I can't use it, you might, and this book looks like a good intro. From the publisher:
Small Basic is a free,…
gregladen | April 6, 2017Have a look at the list of books, below.
Would you like a subset, or all, of these books, in electronic format, for very cheap? There is a way to do that. Note: This is time sensitive, the offer running for just about two weeks and it started yesterday.
I've reviewed several of these books on this blog, and have recommended them. I'm going through Python Crash Course right now, and we've found the various kids programming books to be helpful, for instance. I've not looked at the grey hat or black hat books, but I'm sure they are fine.
The publisher, No Starch Press, has created one of…
gregladen | February 7, 2015From FiveThirtyEight:
You probably don’t know the name Grace Hopper, but you should.
As a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, Hopper worked on the first computer, the Harvard Mark 1. And she headed the team that created the first compiler, which led to the creation of COBOL, a programming language that by the year 2000 accounted for 70 percent of all actively used code. Passing away in 1992, she left behind an inimitable legacy as a brilliant programmer and pioneering woman in male-dominated fields.
Hopper’s story is told in “The Queen of Code,” directed by Gillian Jacobs (of “Community” fame). It…
gregladen | October 23, 2011You will recall that I recently reviewed the book Land of Lisp. It turns out I've got two copies of it, and would like to give one away. To you. As a bounty.
This is not a contest. It is a bounty. You can "win" a brand new copy of Land of Lisp very easily. What you need to do is to supply the best eLisp code, in my opinion, in the comments below. The code should have the following characteristics:
1) It should work, probably as an .el file. Code that you just think might work or has parts like "Then you do something like this bla bla bla" is interesting and you are welcome to post it…
bioephemera | May 31, 2009If you've been following the Jared Diamond/New Yorker controversy, or my ongoing posts on journalism vs. blogging (here, here, here, here, here), you might be intrigued by this conversation about the culture of fact-checking in journalism, between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer, in their podcast series Rebooting the News. Consider this riddle: how is fact-checking in journalism like (or unlike) debugging a computer program?
Here's Rosen's take on it:
One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be borrowed from the tech world. And it's the notion of…