A Few Python Links: Dictionary Idioms, PyMongo, A Book and A Python Analysis Environment

A few selected links from TopicMinder alerts for “Python”.

Python Expression Idiom: Merging Dictionaries

It’s common in Python programming to need to merge 2 or more dictionaries together.

The first idiom is using the dict constructor.  This idiom has it’s limitations, however it will always work fine as long as the keys are all strings.

Python Expression Idiom: Dict Slicing

Python dicts do not natively support slicing.  One of the issues is slicing in Python seems limited to defined ranges, rather than an ad-hoc collection of values.

Dev of the Week: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis – An interview with the maintainer of PyMongo

I’m a Python developer at 10gen, the company that makes MongoDB. I help maintain the standard Python driver for MongoDB (PyMongo), and I’m the author of a non-blocking driver called Motor. Both are open source. Coders at 10gen wear lots of bonnets: I do customer support, blogging, consulting, and speaking, and I spend a lot of time making open source contributions and working with people who contribute to our projects.

Hacking Secret Cyphers with Python Released

My third book, Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python, is finished. It is free to download under a Creative Commons license, and available for purchase as a physical book on Amazon for $25 (which qualifies it for free shipping). This book is aimed at people who have no experience programming or with cryptography. The book goes through writing Python programs that not only implement several ciphers but also can hack these ciphers.

Enthought Canopy – A Python Analysis Environment

Enthought Canopy is a comprehensive Python analysis environment with easy installation & updates of the proven Enthought Python distribution – all part of a robust platform you can explore, develop and visualize on.