A collection of Python "Must Reads"

https://github.com/oussemos/pycrumbs/blob/master/pycrumbs.md

Beginner:

• http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers
• A crash course into Python
• An Introduction to List Comprehensions in Python

Moved to Python from other languages:

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to Pyhton (It's open source, too: http://github.com/kennethreitz/python-guide/)

Python Style:

• PEP8: The Python Style Guide

Python Books:

• Learn Python the Hard Way
• Dive into Python 3
• A Byte of Python
• Porting to Python 3: An in-depth Guide

Python Classes:

• Intermediate and Advanced Software Carpentry in Python (2007)
• Google's Python class
• Introduction to Algorithms (with Python)

Python History:

• Guido Van Rossum's "Python History" blog (all of it!)
• Interfaces or Abstract Base Classes (2005)
• Of Python and Road Maps (or the lack thereof)

Another collection:

• http://resrc.io/tag/tag/python/

Python Setting UP:

• Python Ecosystem - An Introduction
• Bootstrapping a Python Virtual Environment
• Hitchhiker's Guide to Packaging

Posts:

• The Python yield keyword explained
• Python's super() considered super!
• Understanding Python Decorators
• What is a metaclass in Python?
• Metaclasses Demystified
• Try/Catch for validation or speed?
• Python (and Python C API): __new__ versus __init__
• Python "self" keyword
• Python and the Principle of Least Astonishment
• A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency
• Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers
• Code like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python (2007)
• The entire Python Module of the week archive
  • Also see the book - "Python Standard Library by Example"
• (By me) Python Threads and the global interpreter lock
• (By me) Get with the program as context manager
• How to write a Lisp interpreter in Python
• Unicode in Python, Completely Demystified
• Unicode for Dummies - Just use UTF-8
• Debugging in Python
• How to handle multiple inheritance of ABCs that implement each others abstract methods
• AOSA: Python Packaging
• 10 Reasons Python Rocks for Research (And a Few Reasons it Doesn’t)
• Beej's Guide to Network Programming
• How to use Linux epoll with Python
• Python beginner's Mistakes
• Command Line syntax: Some basic Concepts
• Be careful with exec and eval in Python
• Decorators make magic easy
• The detailed guide to "Timsort" (which Java adopted, FWIW)
• Notes on optimizing dictionaries
• Python Patterns - An Optimization Anecdote
• Python Performance Tips
• How-to guide for Python Descriptors
• Hidden Features of Python
• Python is Not Java (2004)
• Java is not Python, either
• Python Interfaces are not Java Interfaces

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Python vs Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented general-purpose programming language which was designed and developed in the mid-1990s. Compared to Python, which treats code readability above everything else, the philosophy behind Ruby is that programmers should have the flexibility, freedom and power to write concise and compact code.

The most important difference between Python and Ruby is that the philosophy of Python requires almost everything explicitly defined by a programmer while Ruby allows the programmer to write code with implicit behaviour inherited from other components. For example, in Ruby, the self in instance methods is implicitly defined while Python requires self to be the first argument declared into an instance method.


In the example code above, the class Hello contains two instance methods hello() and call_hello(). Notice that Ruby's definition of call_hello() simply calls the hello() method without referring to self.hello() like Python's definition does.

source: http://www.pythoncentral.io/

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Why Node.js ?

In one sentence: Node.js shines in real-time web applications employing push technology over websockets. What is so revolutionary about that? Well, after over 20 years of stateless-web based on the stateless request-response paradigm, we finally have web applications with real-time, two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data freely. This is in stark contrast to the typical web response paradigm, where the client always initiates communication. Additionally, it’s all based on the open web stack (HTML, CSS and JS) running over the standard port 80.

Still, Node.js is no silver bullet; in fact it has some real weaknesses -- for instance in CPU-intensive operations and other heavy computation. Find out why Node.js is becoming a go-to platform for some kinds of web development, and why in some cases you still might want to choose another option, like Java.

source: http://www.javaworld.com/article/2104480/java-web-development/why-use-node-js.html#tk.rss_all

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