Intermediate Python Programming

What do Scrabble cheaters, Shakespearean sonnets, Twitter, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day have to do with Python software programming? For software impresario Jessica McKellar, they’re playful tools for teaching intermediate-level Python programming techniques. During her time as an organizer of the Boston Python User Group (one of the world’s largest Python groups), she taught hundreds of Python wannabees to happily program like pros. She uses that experience to benefit the next generation of Pythonistas in this follow-up to her widely popular Introduction to Python video.

• Review data structures like lists, dictionaries, and sets; and when to best use them
• Discover list comprehensions, a conceptual technique for constructing lists in an easy way
• Analyze code performance using tools like profiling, code timing, and Big O notation
• Understand why refractoring code can make it more testable
• Learn best practices for scripting and documentation
• Practice the smart ways to navigate an existing codebase
• Search for, replace, and parse text using regular expressions and the re module
• Understand single threaded programs, threading primitives, and multi-threaded programs

Jessica McKellar is the Director of Engineering at DropBox in San Francisco. A graduate of MIT, she enjoys the Internet, networking, low-level systems engineering, and contributing to and helping other people contribute to open source software. She is a Python Twisted maintainer and a local STEM volunteer.