During last month’s MeetUp, we discussed the idea of introducing a technical book club. The idea being that we each read through selected chapters, attempt the tutorials or code discussed, and discuss that during the meetings. Any recommended titles are appreciated; however, we have three good ones to start with. They are:

Dive into Python 3

by Mark Pilgrim

Available for free at http://www.diveintopython3.net/ (freePDF and HTML version available)

Natural Language Processing with Python

by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper

Available to read for free at http://www.nltk.org/book/

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

by Al Sweigart

Available to read for free at https://tinyurl.com/owk3jpu

There was a poll available on the MeetUp page, and the first book that we’re going to start with is Automate the Boring Stuff by Al Sweigart. Because of the rescheduling for last months meet, I suggest everyone take a look at the first chapter, and we can plan for more before the September meet.

Code Review

In an attempt to develop/sharpen the skills in the group we have a Jupyter notebook where code challenges are presented for the group to try. The link can be found at https://srv.derpy.ws:55523/tree/Challenges. There is a password so if you haven’t received it already, please feel free to contact me on MeetUp and I’ll send you the current password.

The initial code review went well and it was quite interesting to see the variance in solutions presented. Frank even solved his solutions in Java first and then converted his solutions to Python.

Past solutions will remain in each challenge notebook. Feel free to add your own solution at any time. Consider commenting your code to help others understand your approach. If you can’t understand why you wrote something after not looking at it for a while, it could probably benefit from a little extra commenting. In the future we won’t go over every single solution, but we’ll at least cover each challenge. A few new challenges will be posted every month.

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