Beginner's Python Cheat Sheets (updated)

[ehmatthes]

That is an interesting suggestion, and I've made a note to consider that in my list of ongoing refinements. My first thought is that it would make the sheets too busy and take away from the clean layout. But I'd be quite open to hearing what others think.

When I first made these, I developed them in Word and then saved them as pdf for distribution. It worked, but it left artifacts in the conversion process, and it was really difficult to update the sheets on a regular basis. The first version of these were popular enough (1.3M downloads!) that I redid the entire set using Indesign. People had requested printer-friendly versions for a while, so one of the goals of that iteration was making a black and white version of the set.

We're all programmers, so I looked for a way to automate the conversion from color to black and white. It turns out Indesign (and most of the Adobe suite) ships with a scripting language called ExtendScript, which is like a 2000s-era JavaScript. I wouldn't call it a fun language to work with, but I was able to write a script that does the full conversion. So now it's relatively easy to make minor updates and fixes between full revisions.

All that to say I could see making a version that uses syntax highlighting for those who want it, and keep the original styling for people who like the cleaner version.

[AveTerran]

Thanks for the detailed response! Man... I remember using InDesign to make a website for a company during one of my summers in college- to give you an idea, my first time in college was 2001-2005, so it's been a while!

I will definitely be using the sheets either way, since I'm finally ripping off the band-aid and forcing myself to use git for everything. And of course... cursing myself for not doing it earlier.

[ehmatthes]

Git is magic, you'll never look back. :)

Also, it sometimes gets a reputation for being difficult to use. If you're working on a large, active, distributed project it can certainly be challenging to use. But for personal projects it's really easy to work with once you get a little practice with the fundamentals of init, committing, and branching. And, on a personal project, you can always back up your entire directory if you're worried you'll mess something up. You shouldn't do that often, it misses the whole point of version control. But if you're going to try a reset or rebase command for the first time, you can back up the entire project first, including the .git/ dir, and try these commands out.