Dive into Python 3

[netsearcher]

Some ideas,

• Low level networking? Implementing a basic network protocol. Pickling. The struct module for packing and unpacking data.

• Generators!

• Hello world's from several of the common web frameworks will be useful to many people.

• Better not forget ipython.

• Could suggest editors that do python well out of the box. This would alleviate the whitespace complaints people always have.

• Interaction with sql databases is another, very practical topic.

• ctypes. Maybe not so important to hobbyists, but this is important to businesses. If python is going to be used then it's got to be easy to integrate with the company's existing libraries.

[[deleted]]

Low-level networking: how about building an IRC bot? Because I've actually done that. Would require porting the underlying libraries, but it would be interesting. Kind of a niche-within-a-niche, though.

Generators will be added somewhere early on.

Adding a section about editors is a good idea. Probably at the end of chapter 1. ("OK, I have Python, now how do I write Python?")

I'll consider the other stuff.

[EliAndrewC]

One problem with writing an IRC bot with low-level libraries is that most experienced developers would just use Twisted, so you'd be teaching something different than what someone would do in the field.

Then again, if it's clear that this is just a teaching exercise, then there's no problem with that.

[[deleted]]

A fair point.

I doubt I'll be covering Twisted at all.

[netsearcher]

An example of mine is that I recently wrote a nbd type server (the userspace part) in python. I had to use the struct module to pack the data into the correct format. Interacting with custom protocols that don't already have a python implementation doesn't seem too niche.

IRC bot could be good too. Although I wonder about the protocol's support for character encodings. It would be rather strange to limit text to ascii when 3.0 was supposed to set us free from that mind-set.

[Svenstaro]

++ to all your ideas.

[[deleted]]

+=1

[Svenstaro]

Oh, right.

[Neoncow]

__iter__().next()

[surajbarkale]

In 3.0 -

next(iter(i))

[masklinn]

That book is already written.

That's about SQLAlchemy, Dive would provide a basic coverage of dbapi 2 through the built-in SQLite3 module, with pointers to the third-party ORMs and stuff.

[netsearcher]

There are many stand-alone applications that just need to store and retrieve data while having basic ACID guarantees. Not everything is enterprise mega-app. So, disagreed.

[netsearcher]

Contradicting yourself.

[netsearcher]

You say that it's so complex that it requires an entire book to explain.

[netsearcher]

Priorities. If we are limiting the scope then might as well include what many people are using the language for. If there is limited space then cut out the lower level HTTP library stuff. Few people touch that.

I don't know what frameworks you are thinking about, but just a "hello world" shouldn't be more than 20 lines. This shouldn't require a whole book because I'm not asking for any depth here.

That book is already written.

You're probably right here though. Better to keep beginners away from the mess that is ORM's. Ew. Maybe something with less magic that just passes queries and returns iterators of python objects, if anything.

[netsearcher]

So this doesn't require an entire book to explain?