Daily Archives: January 3, 2016

Contributing to Python 3.0 for Informatics

After many years as a successful Open Python 2.0 textbook, the time has come to update Python for Informatics to be Python 3.0. There will be a lot of work since the Python 2.0 textbook and slides have been translated into so many languages and there are five courses on Coursera all built around the textbook.

Since there is so much work to do, I welcome any and all assistance in the conversion and review of the book. If I can get help in converting the core book, I will have time to add three new chapters that have been requested by the students (see the TODO list for details).

While there are several groups that will likely translate the book and/or slides into Python 3.0, lets wait until the book is relatively solid to make sure that all of the variations of these materials are well aligned.

Temporary Copyright

While I am in the process of drafting a book, I do not put it up with a Creative Commons license. I don’t want anyone grabbing the half-completed text and publishing it prematurely. Once the book is in reasonably good shape I switch the copyright to my normal CC license (CC-BY-NC for print books and CC-BY for all electronic copies). I expect the book to be ready to release in early 2016.

Contributing to the Book

The entire text of the book is in GitHub in this repository:

https://github.com/csev/pythonlearn

There are two basic ways to contribute to the book:

  • Create a GitHub account, then navigate to one of the files for the book in the repository like
    https://github.com/csev/pythonlearn/blob/master/book/02-variables.mkd
    Press the pencil icon to edit the text, and then when you “save” the text, it sends me a “pull request” where I can review your changes, approve them, and apply them to the master copy. Once you get going, it is really easy.
  • If you have more tech-skillz, you can “fork” the repository and send me pull requests the normal way. If you use this approach, please send pull requests quickly so we all stay synchronized. Don’t worry about trying to squeeze a bunch of work into a single comment (like many projects prefer). Lots of little commits avoid merge conflicts.

Make sure to take a look at the TODO list to figure out where you can help. We are only working in the book and code3 folders. We will not be converting the code folder as that will be maintained as Python 2.0.

We have a build server that re-builds the entire book every hour at:

http://do1.dr-chuck.com/pythonlearn/

So you can see your contributions appearing in the final book within an hour of me approving your pull request. GitHub tracks your contribution and gives you credit for everything you do. Once the book is ready to publish, I will go through the GitHub history and add acknowledgements for all of the contributions to the text of the book.

If you send in a pull request and it seems like I am not moving quickly enough for you, simply send a tweet with the URL of the pull request and mention @drchuck. That will make sure I see it and get working on it.

Thanks in Advance

I appreciate your interest, support, and effort in helping make this open book a success for all these years.

I want to make sure to acknowledge the contributions from authors of
“Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist” by
Allen B. Downey, Jeff Elkner and Chris Meyers. Their original groundbreaking work in building an open and remixable textbook in 2002 has made the current work possible.