Daily Archives: December 23, 2009

First complete draft of “Python for Informatics” is ready for review

I spent the last week significantly revising “Think Python” in preparation for use in my course SI502 – Networked Programming that starts January 6.
I am at the point where I have reasonably polished text for the first 10 chapters of the book – which is what I will give to the students at the beginning of the semester and will be the first half of the course.

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib//csev/trunk/pyinf/tex/book.pdf

Once the course starts, I will write three more chapters (likely the night before lecture) when the topics come up in the class (Chapters 13, 14, and 15) in the extended table of contents in this version of the book.

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib//csev/trunk/pyinf/tex/book_full.pdf

I don’t where I will go next after that, I may write the visualization chapter (18) – we will see how that course goes. In a sense the book_full.pdf is where I would like to see the book before I publish it for anything other than use in my class.

Of course, books are always smoothed by use in classes and I expect that by using this book in SI502 I will get solid feedback from my students and grad-student instructors.
Of course any comments are always welcome.

I am pretty geeked since it took less than 10 days to produce this book. Now I spend the rest of the break, writing some code, preparing for class in January, and starting that *other* book I keep meaning to write but keep getting distracted from.