Which module should I write about next?
I had some great feedback about the PyMOTW series from several of you at PyCon this weekend. Unfortunately, when I put you on the spot, no one had suggestions for what to write about next. I've been going through the library more or less randomly, and in the absence of a better idea I can continue with that plan. On the other hand, if there's a topic that you would really like more details on, let me know and I'll try to bump it up in the queue. My regular work schedule is pretty slammed right now, so smaller (or simpler) modules will be given higher priority than anything like re or socket, both of which have entire books written about them.
So, speak up and let me know what to write about next week.
26 comments:
pexpect
Could I put in a vote for optparse, please? It's described in the module docs as the successor to getopt, which you have covered before. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the callbacks.
The distutils package probably triggers your "too big" alert. That's the other set of modules I have difficulty with.
@bob: optparse has already been covered.
I think the suggestion on the shuttle bus was urllib (which lets urllib2 be a natural sequel later on).
decimal might be good; I've recently come to be good friends with it.
A totally random suggestion would be random. (Har har.)
__future__!
Hi Doug,
The compiler module seems to be a terrific beast no ?!
Hello Doug,
I also like your helpful postings on Python modules.
I'd like to see a post about the gettext module and internationalization.
Thanks!
Timmie
What the heck, I will put in my $.02 and vote for matplotlib.
Doug,
You've done itertools, but I don't think you've done functools.
BTW, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet you at PyCon.
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Daryl Spitzer
Doug,
It appears you also haven't done re (that's a big one).
--
Daryl
urllib2, please!
Just a straightforward example of how to log on to a site with basic auth and capture the session cookie would be very helpful.
I'd vote for an intro to unicode for our non-English programmers.
Gaze into your crystal ball and look at pickletools for 2.6/3.0.
how about signal?
First off, thank you wery much for your excellent article series
I would very much like to see something on the CGI and email* modules.
As someone else already mentioned urllib* would also be nice.
I vote for collections. Both deque and defaultdict get too little press :)
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
@bob dowling - I'll add distutils to the list, but it may be several weeks before I get to it.
@mike & kent - Yes, urllib did come up on the shuttle, so it's near the top of the list.
@kib - compiler looks pretty complex and might have to wait until after my deadline at work. It's on the list, though.
@anonymous 1 - I need to learn more about internationalization, and writing about gettext would be a good way to do it. See also PyMOTW: locale.
@anonymous 2 - I'm trying to stick to covering the standard library, so matplotlib isn't a candidate for this series. Now if someone wanted to write about it for the magazine, that would be ok. Send me email if you want more details.
yacitus - I missed functools, I should have done that as a follow-up to itertools. Thanks for the pointer. And I met a lot of new people at PyCon this year, but not everyone I wanted to meet either. Maybe next year I should plan a BOF?
@christian - At some point I'll have to switch over to the 2.6/3.0 library. I was hoping to make it most of the way through the 2.5 lib first, but I don't think that's going to happen if I stick to one a week, and I really can't see doing more than one.
@evalinux - signal is another one that might take a while to cover well, given the variety of events that can be trapped. I'll add it near the top of the list, though.
@elzapp - email is a big one, but I should be able to do cgi soon.
@johnlenton - I had planned to work on collections for last week, but ended up doing datetime because of Reed's comment on PyMOTW: time.
@Doug: Switching over to the 2.6/3.0 stuff would be a great way to introduce even long-time Pythonistas to API changes in the standard library. Though I also get a lot of value out of knowing what's available "right now" that I might have forgotten or overlooked.
Doug, a PyMOTW BOF is a great idea for PyCon 2009.
Ditto on decimal. I like struct and sets as well.
@Mike - That's a good point about the 2.6/3.0 modules. I need to learn the differences, too.
@kevin - I'll add decimal to the list.
random.
I'd like to see something about HTMLParser, there's no decent tutorial about in documents and googling doesn't help much either..
If it's not too late for requests, contextlib looks very interesting.
@Son of Martha - I'll add it to the short list.
How about heapq and random? They're very simple, useful and under-publicized.
@taleinat - I'll need to do a little more reading about random numbers before I write about the random module. In the mean time, I've added heapq to the short list. Thanks!
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