San Francisco Bay Area ACM

We will hold a seminar on Saturday November 7 2009 in the HP Oak room in Cupertino. We are very excited about having one a major trainer and book author on the subject, Wesley Chun.

Seminar information

Location:  HP Cupertino, Pruneridge & Wolfe
Date & Duration: November 7, 2009;  Registration: 8:00 am, lecture 8:30 am – 4:00 pm
Cost: SFBAY local chapter member $125, non-member $145
Prerequisites: Programming basics

Registration closed.

Please sign up on the link above. We will have a couple of seats available for walk-ins.

Trainer bio:

WESLEY J. CHUN, MSCS, is the author of Prentice Hall’s bestseller, “Core Python Programming” (http://corepython.com), its video training course, “Python Fundamentals” (LiveLessons DVD), and co-author of “Python Web Development with Django” (http://withdjango.com). In addition to being a senior software architect, he also runs CyberWeb (http://cyberwebconsulting.com), a consulting business specializing in Python software engineering and technical training. He has over 25 years of programming, teaching, and writing experience, including more than a decade of Python. While at Yahoo!, he helped create Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! People Search using Python. He holds degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Music from the University of California.

Wesley has 3 books out on the market right now. They’re all relatively current, either published in or has a current printing this year:

Core Python Programming, 2nd ed. (2007), 5th printing (2009)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0132269937

Python Web Development with Django, (2009)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0132356139

Python Fundamentals (LiveLessons DVD), (2009)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0137143419

Seminar Details

Introduction to Python

Wesley J. Chun
ACM San Francisco Bay Area Chapter
November 7, 2009

Python is an agile object-oriented programming language that is continuing to build momentum… popular with open source developers as one incarnation of LAMP for applications and web development, especially for Python’s web frameworks that are similar to Rails: Django (including Google App Engine), TurboGears, Pylons, Zope and Plone (all RIA platforms), plus Trac and Mailman, the wiki+issue-tracker and popular mailing list manager, respectively. Web developers know about JSON already, but did you know that it maps nearly identically to Python’s dictionary/hash type?

Of course Python can do XML/ReST/XSLT for the web too, but there are also numerous libraries for: multithreading, SQL/databases, GUIs, math/science/numerical processing, Internet client/server systems and networking (heard of Twisted?), GIS/ESRI, QA/test, automation frameworks, plus system administration tasks too! If Python doesn’t do what you want, you can extend it in C/C++, Java, or C# (and even VB.NET)! Have you noticed the huge growth in the number of jobs on Monster and Dice that list Python as a desired skill?

With Python, you can create just about any app that most modern languages (i.e., Java, C/C++/C#, Ruby, PHP, and Perl) enable, but it’s more fun and intuitive! You can code as fast as you think! Because of Python’s simple yet robust syntax, it’s a great tool to teach programming (heard of Alice?) with as well as a solid (first) language to learn for non-programmers and other technical staff. Come find out why Google, Yahoo!, Disney, Cisco, YouTube, BitTorrent, LucasFilm/ILM, VMware, NASA, Ubuntu, and Red Hat all use Python!

Covered in the seminar:

- Getting Started
- Background & Resources
- Language Introduction
- Importing: Modules & Packages
- Standard Data Types, Operators & Built-ins
- Files and Input/Output
- Flow Control: Loops and Conditionals
- Errors and Exceptions
- Creating & Calling Functions & Methods
- Python Object-Oriented Programming
- Recent Updates to Python
- Python 2 vs. Python 3 (the next generation)

You can deepen your understanding of Python by visiting the CyberWeb Python training class right after this seminar, November 9-11 in San Francisco.  Click for details.

This seminar is designed by Wesley Chun, software engineer, technical trainer, and author of Prentice-Hall’s bestseller “Core Python Programming”, it’s video training course, “Python Fundamentals” LiveLessons DVD, and co-author of “Python Web Development with Django”, for those wanting to find out what Python is all about and what you can do with it! We have had great success and feedback giving an abbreviated one-hour version of this seminar over the past decade, such as at conferences as well as to academia:

* Silicon Valley CodeCamp 2009
http://siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Speakers.aspx?id=203
* OSCON 2009
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/10214
* Safari Books Online, 2009
http://www.safaribooksonline.com/events/WhatIsPython.html
* Silicon Valley CodeCamp 2008
(no link available)
* Silicon Valley CodeCamp 2007
http://cc07.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?OnlyOne=true&id=162
* OSCON 2006
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/9468
* San Francisco State, 2005
http://cs.sfsu.edu/news/pernet/05/10-12-05.html
* OSCON 2003
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2003/view/e_sess/4539
* OSCON 2002
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/15/bof.html#tuesday
* Linux Showcase and Conference, 2001
(no link available)
* Purdue University, 2000
http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/pipermail/plug/2000-August/002739.html
* OSCON 2000
(no link available)

FREE PREVIEW: Partnering with O’Reilly and Pearson Education, I delivered a one-hour abridged version of this seminar as a webcast at Safari Books Online earlier this year called  What is Python? You get both my lecture style as well as an overview of the material covered in the course.

http://www.safaribooksonline.com/events/WhatIsPython.html (event announcement)
http://www.safaribooksonline.com/Corporate/DownloadAndResources/webcastInfo.php?page=WhatIsPython (free download with registration)